you, too, can be a lava monster if you want to

[kaberett]

Friends Who Shall Remain Unnamed (but are welcome to identify themselves in comments) decided, earlier, that it would be hilarious to direct my attention towards this tiktok. It's captioned and audio's unnecessary, but the content goes like this:

So, somebody asked me a seemingly very innocuous question, "Is ice a rock?" and it is. Geologists say it is. Then someone else asked me a question that I knew the answer was going to be no to, "Well, if ice is a rock, is water lava?"

I was like, "No. There's no way this is gonna be-"

I looked it up and I'm reading about it, and it's like... it kinda is! Lava is any molten rock that comes out of a terrestrial planet. Now, molten means liquefied by heat. This is- *science frustration* I don't know what to believe anymore. Ice is a rock, water is lava, and you are a lava monster... I guess!?

Now. You need to understand, this is a group of people who have previously witnessed what happens when someone innocently says "hey, kab, can you... explain... this science fiction? it's saying this planet has a core made of low-density non-conductive metal--" i.e. WHAT THE FUCK DO THEY THINK A "METAL" IS THEN (tl;dr "electrons go whoosh") (honestly it took me an embarrassingly long time to hit the AND ANOTHER THING-- of "if it's low density it wouldn't have segregated to form a core--")

... so the betting pool was apparently 50-50 on whether they were going to get, you know, that kind of reaction or, instead, the one of OH BOY LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT THE EIGHTEEN DIFFERENT CRYSTALLINE FORMS OF ICE AND ALSO EUROPA'S ICE VOLCANOES--

... but they got the latter, and now you do too.

[this has been a Fun Geology interlude in your scheduled programme of Thesis Angst, sponsored by--]

Comments

[hilarita]

Anyway, everything other than H and He is a metal... if you're an astronomer.

*watches chemists crying in a corner*

[lireavue]

*fond and still giggling* And thank you for reminding me how UTTERLY BADASS Europa is, as I had temporarily mislaid that brain-file.

[alexseanchai]

*grinning*

[fyreharper]

:D

[serpentrose]

Thank you for sharing this - it made my day.

[steorra]

:-)

(Europa picture, of course.)

[davidgillon]

AND ALSO EUROPA'S ICE VOLCANOES--

Hmm, he says innocently, does this mean mud from a mud volcano is lava?

;)

[recessional]

“Proton ordered semetric ice “ is the name of my next band.

[silveradept]

This sounds like one of those things where we have to remember that the categories that we use for classification are actually a lot broader than we think they are. And I'm also imagining one of those "purist, neutral, chaotic" 3x3 grids with rocks and lava as the two axes.

*raises hand*

[vass]

I for one am delighted to learn that I am a lava monster.

Also, ICE VOLCANOES.

[cesy]

:)

[cloudsinvenice]

I am so happy to learn that ice volcanoes exist!

[ludy]

John Green from the TikTok was a guest at the HPST summer camp and gave relationship advice to various Hogwarts inhabitants - including answering a letter i wrote in as Winky the HouseElf*. He was both hilarious and very sensible...


*she felt torn between HouseElf culture and her partner Dobby's FreeElf Activism

[swingandswirl]

Noooo. Bad. /makes sign of the cross/

Thanks for the link to Europa's ice volcanoes, though, they are awesome.

[hairyears]

Presumably - or at least, plausibly - there are volcanoes spewing out the other common hydrides, too: liquefied methane ice, and ammonia.

Or even longer hydrocarbons than methane: if they can rain out of the atmosphere and form lakes on the surface of Titan, they can melt in the subsurface layers of accreted carbonaceous chondrites that orbit Jupiter or Saturn.