What building an indestructible aircraft carrier has to do with how glaciers flow
 

In this talk  I will touch upon several aspects of Max Perutz’s career as it relates to ice. Max Perutz is best known as a molecular biologist who won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on deciphering the structure of hemoglobin. Perutz was of Jewish ancestry and fled Austria in 1936 to the UK, where he pursued a PhD with Bernal and Bragg on X-ray crystallography. His PhD and later work focused on finding the structure of proteins, but he had an early interest in ice and played a crucial role in figuring out how solids, such as ice, can deform.
During the Second World War, Perutz was first detained as an enemy combatant, but was later recruited for the top-secret Habakkuk project. The project was based on an idea by the extremely resourceful, although borderline crazy, Geoffrey Pyke. Despite support from the highest level of command, the ultimately doomed project involved building an unsinkable aircraft carrier out of ice. Perutz spent parts of the war devising ways to increase the strength of ice. This was successful, but the fact that ice is easily deformable eventually invalidated the concept.