4 January: we visit the
Nakaya Ukichiro Museum of Snow and Ice in Kaga City. Up here, just inside Ishikawa’s prefectural border, the rice fields are lightly dusted in white. Snow was Nakaya’s core business; he is best known for cataloguing its crystal types and establishing a classification system that paved the way for
the ones in worldwide use today.
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Nakaya Ukichiro researching
snow in the Tokachi region |
We are lucky to find the museum open at all – the stone steps leading up to the usual entrance have been roped off. So we find our way in via the museum office instead. The main exhibition hall presents a timeline of Nakaya’s life – born in Kaga in 1900, attended the elite Kanazawa Fourth High School, went up to Tokyo University in 1922 to study physics …
In retrospect, it might seem obvious that a bright young physicist from Japan’s snow country would devote his scholarly life to the white stuff. But real life is less straightforward. In his second year at Tokyo University, the year of the Great Kanto Earthquake, Nakaya came under the mentorship of
Terada Torahiko of RIKEN, whose scientific watchword was “Aren’t you amazed by this?” (fushigi da to wa omoimasen ka?)
Terada would strongly influence the way that Nakaya went about his investigations. As the latter recalled:
Terada considered a ‘physics of form’, concerning which he frequently said ‘If the forms of the phenomena are the same, they are governed by the same laws. To pass over the similarity of forms as merely a superficial agreement is to act as a person who doesn’t understand the true meaning of the word ‘form’. Terada’s words have a very deep meaning, for he not only meditated on the idea but he did actual research into the forms that appeared in various phenomena: his research into fractures, electric sparks, sparklers and the flow of charcoal calligraphy ink all shared the underlying theme of research into forms.
After the great earthquake of September 1923, an event that probably altered Japan’s political evolution, Terada would go on to found Tokyo University’s Earthquake Research Institute, with Nakaya's help. But it was a smaller-scale disaster that shifted the younger man's trajectory. When an airship of the Imperial Navy exploded in mid-air in March 1924, Terada asked his student to help him find out why.
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| Photos of electrical sparking by Nakaya Ukichiro |
The scientists concluded that an electrostatic discharge had ignited the airship’s gasbags, which led Nakaya to a study of electrical sparking. Via graduate studies at London University, where he studied x-rays, this work took him to an assistant professorship at Hokkaido University.
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| Researching snow in Hokkaido |
According to
Wikipedia, the Sapporo-based university was short on funds and experimental equipment. Snow, on the other hand, was available in unlimited quantities. The 3,000 snowflake photos published by Wilson Bentley (1865-1931) were a further inspiration to Nakaya, who had built up his own expertise in micro-photography while recording electrical sparks.
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| The mountain lodge where Nakaya photographed snowflakes |
Having found his metier, Nakaya went out into the Hokkaido mountains to study and record snow crystals. After documenting their forms in some 3,000 macro photos, he then sought to reproduce the way that snowflakes form, ultimately persuading the world’s first artificial snow crystals to form on a rabbit’s hair.
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| Supercooled water freezes instantly |
At this point, a museum attendant rounds us up for a live demonstration of supercooled water. We breathe into a freezer cabinet to see how “
diamond dust” forms and watch how a bottle of supercooled water freezes almost instantly when shaken – just as supercooled cloud droplets freeze solid when they hit the wings of a plane.
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| Airframe for icing experiments at Niseko, 1943 |
The same insights inspired Nakaya’s research during the war years. A superannuated military aircraft – some say a Zero fighter – was dragged up to the top of a mountain near Niseko in 1943 and left to accumulate ice in the freezing winter winds. Nakaya also experimented with artificial fog dissipation. Sooner or later, scientific theory would always yield up practical applications, he believed.
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A landscape by Nakaya Ukichiro
painted while convalescing in the Izu Peninsula |
There was more to Nakaya than snow science. We had already admired some of his paintings – Terada-sensei encouraged his students to draw and paint as a way of honing their observational skills – and on our way out, we noticed the cover of a children’s book that Nakaya wrote and published for his two daughters. For the literary arts too were part of his philosophy:
I am not knowledgeable about modern methods of specialised education. However, reflecting on my own childhood experiences, I suspect that perhaps an outwardly unscientific education may have an unexpected effect of enhancing feelings of wonder about nature. The dreams of childhood may be unrestrained and nonsensical, but I would advise against suppressing such dreams too quickly. Children who do not know about sea monsters (umibōzu) and river demons (kappa) are unfortunate. Not only are they unfortunate, but they may also be deprived of a true scientific education if the umibōzu and kappa are expelled too soon from their worlds.
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| The Nakaya family at home in Tokyo, 1930s |
Appropriately, the museum's next live demonstration appeals as much to the imagination as the intellect. We watch as a museum staffer takes a fresh block of ice out of a handy freezer cabinet, shines a bright light on it, and shows us how melt cavities form inside the ice, almost like snowflakes in reverse. Named for John Tyndall, the Victorian scientist and alpinist, the phenomenon was further investigated by Nakaya in the 1950s.
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| Demonstrating how Tyndall figures form |
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| Like negative snowflakes, Tyndall figures appear in an ice-block |
By this time, he was attached to the US Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment (SIPRE) in Illinois. Among other projects there, he studied how snow can be milled to make surfaces hard enough for roads and runways. Under the auspices of SIPRE, he also visited the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska and Thule in Greenland, where he researched the crystalline structure of glacier ice:
After a two-year study of single crystals of ice, I came to the conclusion that can be summed up in one sentence: ice is a metal.
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| Nakaya at an ice laboratory in Greenland |
From 1957 onwards, Nakaya spent four summers at Site-2, a research station located 400 kilometres inland on the Greenland ice sheet, taking part in early attempts to bring up ice cores for climatic research. Increasingly he was thinking about how ice and snow fitted into a bigger picture:
Because of the global increase in atmospheric temperature since the beginning of the 20th century, glaciers in many places worldwide are shrinking or retreating. The cause is an increase in CO2 due to the automobile-dominated society and the cutting down of forests. Warming of the climate will melt the ice in Antarctica and Greenland leading to a sea-level rise, and lowlands all over the world will be in danger of being submerged.
Such insights are familiar today, but Nakaya published these words in 1957. The aim of his research now was to understand how the global water cycle – how snow turns to ice in glaciers and so returns to water – interacts with the climate. But time was running short.
Ultimately, Nakaya’s fascination with Greenland was the death of him. Before his last trip to Thule, he refused to visit a doctor, knowing that a check-up would reveal health issues that would prevent him travelling. He returned to Tokyo exhausted by the journey, and died in April 1962.
In a sense, it was inevitable that Nakaya's life’s work would remain unfinished. For, as he himself said, “No amount of investigation into a block of ice could reveal all its myriad secrets.”
