Fairbanks holds many wonders for the casual visitor, not least of which is the annual World Ice Art Championships. Artists sculpt elaborate and clever designs in blocks of solid ice cut from a nearby rock quarry lake. The amount of time and skill that goes into carving these works of art is phenomenal! Artist teams have 2.5 days to carve a 5' x 8' x 3' block of ice, and many work around the clock using chisels and chainsaws. Here are some photos.
Ice sculptors paid magnificent attention to detail and took painstaking care in their work
The sculptors were still working on this one... not sure whether the alligator ended up eating the boy.
A sculptor finishing his masterpiece
Mr. O'Hara reincarnated as an ice dwarf.
Some artists make more "interactive" exhibits like an ice maze and these ice slides. It's hard to convey the entertainment value of sliding down a hill of ice on your butt, but one word sums it up: woohoo!
For the nerdier visitors to Fairbanks, check out the CRREL Permafrost Tunnel. This tunnel into the side of the hill shows visitors a cross-section of the Alaskan permafrost through loose soil and organic matter, revealing bizarre ice lenses and ice wedges, giving scientists an idea of the climate of the region for the past 40,000 years.
This is an exposed portion of an ice wedge in the permafrost tunnel. Water works its way into cracks, expands, and freezes repeatedly over thousands of years, creating wedges of pure water ice deep in the permafrost.
Our guide took us through the tunnel, explaining the science behind permafrost.
actually, the ice crystals had only frozen recently, but the water that it is made of came from moisture in the permafrost, trapped underground for up to 40,000 years!