Analysis of the beads suggests they are microtektites, particles that form when the explosive impact of an extraterrestrial object sends molten debris hurtling into the atmosphere where it cools and
recrystallizes before falling back to Earth.
Thus the salts scattered in "A Downward Look," having become living creatures, turn to the "fossil" of "A Look Askance," which turns to stone that in "An Upward Look" dissolves and then recrystallizes, reaching upward from the grave toward the stars.
The gem formation and chemical synthesis in "Press Release," the salts that dissolve and recrystallize in "A Downward Look" and "An Upward Look," the materials that undergo melting, cooling, and metamorphic or synthetic rearrangement in "A Look Askance," "Volcanic Holiday," "Alabaster," and "The Pyroxenes" all model an ongoing alternation between the achieved gem and the temporal dissolution out of which it arises and to which it returns.
Vapor moves from the warmer, lower layer and recrystallizes as it seeps through the cold snow above, altering the shape and size of ice grains there.
One way of determining the risk of avalanche in any given spot is to dig pits and look for telltale signs of weak layers, such as so-called depth hoar and surface hoar--freezer-burn-like frost that occurs when snow vaporizes and recrystallizes. The technique is useful but costly and time-consuming.
Once the moisture evaporates, the salt
recrystallizes, exerting tremendous pressures that break down the masonry from within.
Longitudinal sections show that the melted material recrystallizes on the fibers as nuclei.
It has been suggested that these are longitudinal regions of lower density or lower constraint, which melt before and recrystallize within the surrounding rigid cage of material, possibly associated with a rigid stretched molecular network of entangled molecules.
Initially, Tulk and colleagues at the National Research Council of Canada and from the University of California at Los Angeles were exploring the structural nature of amorphous ice -- a state of ice that forms with no ordered crystalline structure -- as it
recrystallizes at even higher pressures.
In the presence of a metal catalyst, such as nickel, and a diamond seed crystal, the CVD material dissolves into the catalyst and
recrystallizes into gem-quality diamonds as big as pencil erasers.