A brinicle is an underwater stalactite that forms when brine at a temperature lower than the freezing temperature of water is ejected from sea ice and into the ocean below. The ocean water freezes around this stream, and as the brine is ejected the brinicle grows in both length and width.
For my bachelor’s thesis, I designed and built an experiment to grow and visualize brinicles in a freezer. By lighting the tank with green LEDs and using a fluorescent dye, we’re not only able to visualize the ice, but the flow of the brine as well.
By separating these images by color channel we are able to measure the growth of the brinicle in length and width as well as the wall thickness. We grew brinicles in water of different ambient salinities and observed that the ice crystals are arranged differently in brinicles grown in fresh vs. saline water.
Kausalya Mahadevan 