Remember how when you were a kid, on a sunny day you might try and set ants on fire with a magnifying glass? I’m not sure why ants are always the victims, but in wintertime Fairbanks, ants are kind of scarce. So when somebody made giant lenses from ice, the obvious targets became tourists and ice sculptures...                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

    Seriously, the lens above was no longer working well when I took this picture, but if you put your hand behind it, it wasn’t hard to get a little taste of what the ants probably felt. When not sun-damaged (which is somewhat ironic), these lenses can set paper on fire, just like a magnifying glass. Apparently, it took a while to figure out the right curvature on the lens as ice doesn’t work exactly the same way that glass does, but after a bit of trial and error and using a BIG piece of ice, they were able to pull it off. Need more proof? Click here for an article on this oddly interesting project, courtesy of the Denver Post.

The following comment was on the original blog entry. After some technical difficulties, the blog had to be reconstructed, and this was the only way to keep the original comments.

James Ottens (ICEWIZ)

I just watched a week ago an episode of Mythbusters where they had to prove the myth that you can start a fire with an ice lens, At the end, they actually started a bunch of straw on fire Busting the Myth!

Friday, March 14, 2008 - 08:24 PM