Making an Ice Didgeridoo on the Glaciers of Antarctica

To liven up the dull moments of living on the Antarctic ice, ANSMET scientists and engineers built a didgeridoo out of H2O and butter! Instead of the usual game of “counting the number of grains in a teaspoon of snow,” ANSMET (Antarctic Search for Meteorites) pursued the mission of building a didgeridoo.

After several failed construction methods, one of which used toilet-paper rolls and Pringles cans to form a mold for water to freeze around, the team had a breakthrough - they discovered that when a snowy structure such as a snowball was allowed to absorb water and then freeze, an extraordinarily strong composite was formed. This ice-ice composite is what ANSMET used to create their ice didge!

They created several 1-2ft long tubes of snow by first drilling holes in the side of a snow bank and then extracting the tubes by carving around the existing holes. This was the only way of keeping the low tensile snow tubes intact throughout construction. These snow tubes were then dipped in water and allowed to freeze overnight at the glacier’s natural temperature of -18.4 degrees Fahrenheit. After the super hard tubes were fused together with snow and ice, the team attached a mouthpiece of butter which solved the “damp tongue to frosty jungle gym” problem. Messing around in the Antarctic can be disastrous as Don Pettit explains… “My moist flapping lips were soon glued to the end of this five foot long tube of ice. When your lips are frozen to a tube of ice, you can not even scream.”

Listen to the ice didge in action and enjoy the entire ANSMET/didge field post which is very funny (and educational) and definitely worth the read. (look for the link on the right side of the page, 3rd from the top)

P.S. ANSMET wants you to build a portable wind instrument to deploy at their campsite. Humor/odd is the only way these people can stay sane in the sometimes stuporous desert that is the Antarctic!