Morse code messages can be trapped in bubbles within blocks of ice

The information could potentially be stored in the ice for millennia, simply by making subtle modifications to the shape and position of the internal bubbles, which can then be converted into binary or Morse codes.

Mengjie Song at the Beijing Institute of Technology in China and his team studied ice training when they realized that they could influence the size and shape of the bubbles that were formed inside. For example, when the layers of freezing water between the plastic sheets, they found that the modification of the freezing rate created layers of bubbles in the shape of an egg or needle -shaped.

The researchers then attributed bubble sizes, shapes and positions to characters in Morse and binary codes. Control of the water freezing rate between the plastic sheets then created ice which explained a message via internal bubbles.

When they converted a photo of this ice into a gray scale, the areas that seemed white represented regions of ice with bubbles, while the black areas were without bubbles. From this, a computer could detect the size and position of the bubbles and decode the message.

Only a few information sentences could be stored in a standard ice cube using the technology available, but information can also be stored by handling bubbles inside materials such as plastics, Songs explains.

He says research has many applications, in addition to “novelty of being able to read a coded message in an ice cubes in a drink”. “The advantage of this study is the capacity of long -lasting information storage in a cold environment, as in the North or South Pole,” says Song.

Understanding the bubbles better means that they could one day be designed to contain ozone for food preservation or have slow release medicines, he said. He is particularly interested in how bubbles could help prevent ice cream on plane wings and learn how they will behave in lunar environments.

But Qiang Tang at the University of Sydney, Australia, is less convinced by the real potential of the study, arguing that important information can be stored for a long time on hard drives or paper, which is easily saved.

“This is a new way of representing a message and storing it in a new place, but from the point of view of cryptography or security, I do not think that it is useful at least a polar bear does not want to say something to someone,” he said.