EVERYONE: Some lengthy thoughts about the science/history behind Regice

[elementcollector1]

WARNING: Excessive amounts of technical writing. I tried to make it fun, but there's only so much I can do. Contains a few instances of strong language.

Anyway, I've been working on Project Pokedex to write extended articles on every Pokemon with regards to caretaking advice and biology, and one Pokemon in particular that interested me was Regice. Something about its Pokedex entries seemed a little too specific, a little more detail-oriented than most others. So I did some digging, and apparently Regice's entry was either written by a genius in meteorology and thermodynamics, or by an extremely lucky writer with a fondness for specific values.

I also ended up (somewhat) accidentally writing this like an episode of Game Theory, since even I couldn't bear to read all the boring math details without a few jokes to lighten the load. But, if you want to learn a lot about some very minor details of both Earth and the (canon) Pokemon world, you've come to the right place! So, without further ado, here's the thought piece I wrote and researched:


An interesting detail is hidden deep within Pokemon’s lore. Specifically, the Iceberg Pokemon Regice has some very interesting tidbits on its formation and history. To quote from the Pokedex entries for Regice (amalgamated into a more useful paragraph):

“Regice is a Legendary Pokemon whose body was made during an ice age. Its deep-frozen Antarctic ice body cannot be melted by fire or even by submerging it in molten lava, and maintains a constant temperature by cloaking itself with frigid air of approximately -200 degrees C. It is said to have slept in a glacier for thousands of years, and was imprisoned some time ago by humans.”

Ice at -200 degrees C may simply sound extremely cold, but there’s actually a very specific reference hidden here. Ice, you see, forms different crystal structures at different pressures and temperatures, named in a Roman system from ice-Ih (regular hexagonal ice that we see everywhere) all the way up to ice-XVI, each having different (and often very specific) formation requirements. However, one particular form stands out: Ice-XI is unusual for being one of the few exotic forms to (theoretically) be capable of forming naturally, at ambient pressure, at -200 degrees C (73 K). It is also theoretically the most stable configuration of ice-Ih, allowing it to form from regular ice if cooled to the correct temperatures.

However, the coldest temperature ever recorded on Planet Earth was about -89 degrees C, in the Antarctic in 1983 – extremely cold, cold enough even to freeze carbon dioxide in the air, but not quite enough to make everyone’s favorite mobile freezer. Things would undoubtedly be colder in an ice age, but not by too much – geological measurements estimate the ground temperature of Antarctic ice varied only by 15 degrees C over the past 800,000 years, meaning our best-case scenario lies around -104 degrees C. Better, but still not good enough.

However, an unexpected savior comes in the form of Regice’s Trio Master, Regigigas, whose Pokedex entries in its debut series Diamond/Pearl/Platinum were kind enough to give some additional details about Regice’s creation. To quote again:

“There is an enduring legend that states this Pokémon towed continents with ropes. It is said to have made Pokémon that look like itself from a special ice mountain, rocks, and magma.”

We can deduce that the mountain is Coronet, for obvious reasons – there are no named mountains in Hoenn, and while it is possible that Mt. Fuji or Mt. Silver could have been the source, Coronet is far closer to Regigigas’ temple in Snowpoint City. Second, Mt. Coronet has already been shown to be ‘special’ – its strange magnetic field is one of the few places in the Pokemon world that allows for certain evolutions to occur. In addition, it houses Spear Pillar, the (presumed) gateway and central interaction point between the Pokemon World and the dimensions of Time, Space, Distortion and Creation (as all four of the Original Quartet can meet the player at this location). Finally, Mt. Silver and Fuji share no special distinctions beyond being mountains above the permanent snow line (they have snow year-round).

Regice being made from mountain ice is actually very important, as it gives us another shot at getting down to the proper temperatures. As anyone who’s ever climbed a mountain knows, the temperature drops as altitude increases due to decreased air pressure. Think of it as a massive column of air – if you move upwards on the column, there’s less weight pushing down from above, and therefore less pressure. This allows air molecules to move around more freely, and have less average energy – the basis of our understanding of temperature.

However, actually calculating the height of Mt. Coronet is more difficult than previously thought. A prior calculation I did (arriving at 17 km) completely ignores the presence of the tropopause, an altitude limit that keeps temperature relatively constant above itself.

Fig. 1, some meteorological bullshit.

Fortunately, because temperature is a nebulous concept at the best of times, and because of a few aforementioned details, a few tricks play to our favor. For starters, Regice is specifically stated to be made of Antarctic ice, meaning Mt. Coronet may not have originated in the exact spot it’s currently at. This is possible because Regigigas is capable of towing continents into place, and because Regice is visually composed of ice with a bluish hue – namely, blue ice, found in Antarctica where snow is densified and packed into airless ice, taking on a blue hue only due to sheer thickness (water, as we know, is also blue in color due to the O-H bond in the molecule absorbing light more efficiently in other parts of the spectrum). The note about Regice’s ice being from Antarctica and from an ice age (plenty of time for compaction) supports this very strongly.

So how high do we have to get to get down to -200 degrees C, at the top of a mountain, in the middle of an ice age, localized entirely in your kitchen? Thankfully, people have crunched the numbers on this. On average, the temperature drops something like -9.84 degrees C every kilometer (before you reach the tropopause, at which point the temperature drop roughly stops, as shown above). Taking our base temperature of -104 degrees C and this number, we get a total mountain height (above sea level) of about 9.7536 km. This is actually very realistic! For reference, the peak of Mt. Everest is about 8.848 km above sea level, and the estimated total height of Mauna Kea (the actual tallest mountain in the world, if more than half of it wasn’t underwater) is about 9.966 km.

From there, we can derive a few more interesting things. It turns out (from a very rough observation) that the maximum mountain height on different planets is roughly linearly proportional to their gravitational acceleration, as shown by the data below.

Fig. 2, lord help me I’m back on my bullshit.

Why is this? As best I can tell, it's something to do with the compressive strength of the bulk materials making up the mountain. The mass of the rock multiplied by the value of gravity gives a certain weight, which when considering the area of the mountain gives a certain pressure. This pressure, if the mountain is too tall, would exceed the compressive strength of the rock underneath it, causing the mountain to collapse under its own weight unless below that height limit.

The equation relating maximum mountain height to planetary gravity can then be used to find the gravity in the Pokemon world, which comes out to something like 9.35 m/s^2, extremely close to our value of 9.81 m/s^2. It might even be that gravity is the exact same, as all this takes place under the assumption that Coronet is the tallest mountain when that might not quite be the case.

This also raises logistical questions – namely, how in the Distortion World did the protagonists of Diamond, Pearl and Platinum manage to climb the equivalent of Mount Everest at ten years old and not suffer from hypoxia, severe frostbite, and other natural consequences of such a harsh environment? Well, for starters, Mt. Coronet’s current height is likely not the same as its original height. Keep in mind that it only had to be that tall during the ice age in which Regice’s ice was formed, and Regigigas moved it later to its current location. Towing a continent with ropes begs the question of how one moves a continent to begin with, and it can be presumed that Regigigas simply sped up existing plate tectonics with the use of a massive amount of strength (seriously, the amount of force it must take to move an entire tectonic plate is best reserved for another document). However, for the purposes of the story we’re telling, it’s fairly safe to say that Regigigas moved the plate containing Mt. Coronet (or the plate boundary containing Coronet, as we don’t know specifics) to a more temperate location than the Antarctic. It may well be that Coronet lost considerable height in the process, bringing it down to a more reasonable altitude and allowing small children to summit it without much difficulty.

There are also some other interesting things to consider about Regice. Its height is completely inconsistent with its weight – scaling a 3D model, one finds that Regice’s total volume is around 0.75 m^3 and that its density is therefore somewhere around 0.2333 g/cm^3 – nowhere near regular ice’s density of 0.9340 g/cm^3 at -180 degrees C or ice-XI’s recorded value of 0.91 g/cm^3 (which, unfortunately, is one of the higher-density ice crystal forms). In addition, microscopic air voids that lower the density of regular ice (and give it its characteristic milky translucent color) cannot be the answer here, as we previously determined that Regice was made of densified blue ice that owes its color to a lack of trapped air. In fact, if we do the same for Regirock and Registeel, we find the same result – their weight is completely inconsistent with their volume and stated material. Regirock is made of natural rock, so unless there’s a natural rock out there with a density significantly less than pumice, why the discrepancy? Registeel's Pokedex entry gives us a possible answer – a hollow cavity within its body could explain the lesser weight, being replaced by air, vacuum or something else entirely. But the crystals that compose Regice appear roughly monocrystalline – and why would there be a hollow cavity in any of the three to begin with? Doing some rough calculations, we can find that in order for a hollow cavity to exist within Regice’s body, the cavity would have to comprise nearly 75% of Regice’s volume to bring its weight down to the correct number assuming the standard density of ice-XI as the bulk material density. This cavity, modeled as a cube, would be about 82.3 cm (32.4”) to a side, which is certainly possible to hide in the main body of Regice due to its bulky construction. But… why would it be there to begin with? Was that some important detail when Regigigas made the Legendary Golems, to include a hollow cavity within each of them?

Lastly, and the question most of you were probably asking this whole time, how does Regice not melt when encased in lava, or just melt over time to begin with? Frankly, I have no idea. There’s not even a theoretical framework to support such a lack of heat transfer through ice of any type, so I quite honestly have to pull the ‘it’s magic’ card on this one. Specifically, Ice-type magic. A copout, I know, but I can’t think of any other viable answer at the moment.

This timeline of events also raises questions about the nature of the Sinnoh region. It’s stated that Arceus created the Sinnoh region, and Coronet is clearly an important place to the Alpha Pokemon – but then, why did Regigigas have to bring it over from Antarctica? It’s never been said exactly how Arceus created Sinnoh, so it could well have been a ‘commission’ or order given to Regigigas, who simply did the heavy lifting. It’s also stated in lore discovered in the Hoenn region (both in Ruby/Sapphire/Emerald and Omega Ruby/Alpha Sapphire) that the people who worshipped Regigigas (and presumably created the Snowpoint Temple to seal it away in fear of its power) ‘owed it all’, meaning that Regigigas saved them from an event that would have presumably caused their extinction. What that event is is uncertain – a food drought, a tectonics-related problem, or something else entirely – but what is still more interesting is the timeline of events that follows afterwards. For a time, Regigigas was clearly worshipped – but that changed when the people began to fear its power, conspiring to seal it away. They did the same for its creations, Regirock, Regice and Registeel – but why in Hoenn, so far away from the Snowpoint Temple? In Pokemon Platinum, the Golems can be found if one has an event-only Regigigas in certain tombs around Sinnoh – but is this canon, considering these areas didn’t exist in Diamond and Pearl, or just a way to shoehorn the Golems into Platinum (much like certain other Legendaries appear outside their debut regions)? Could the Golems have chased the people all the way to Hoenn, seeking revenge for the imprisonment of their master, or were they taken there to prevent Regigigas from reawakening, as it does when the player confronts it with the three in their party? The latter may be a stretch, as possessing the three Golems doesn’t actually directly awaken Regigigas – it simply allows the woman guarding the temple to let you in. In addition, the anime shows multiple times that Regigigas can wake up simply from outside stimuli, heedless of the presence or lack thereof of its own Golems near it. Either way, why the sudden shift in treatment of Regigigas and its kind by the people that formerly worshipped it? Some clues may be left in their messages, as they sealed the Golems (and presumably Regigigas) away in the hope that one day they could be tamed by someone strong enough to control their power.

There is some support for the theory that the former Sinnoans (is that the right word?) fled southward, whether pursued by the Golems or carrying them as cargo. The Sinjoh Ruins exist because a grouo of people from Sinnoh met up with a group of people from the Ruins of Alph (home of the Unown), and decided to create a temple honoring the Original Quartet together. There are no references to the Golems or Regigigas anywhere in the Sinjoh Ruins, however, which is for obvious reasons in gameplay terms (the theme of the area being more about the Creation Quartet and Unown, not the Golems) but may imply a more interesting story reason – that at this time, the people fleeing from Sinnoh had stopped worshipping the Golems and wanted little more to do with them.

It’s been widely theorized that the first four regions of the Pokemon world (and corresponding games) all take place on the same continental landmass, shaped roughly like Japan. This would place Sinnoh as the Hokkaido region, the northmost point, and Hoenn as the Kyushu region, the southernmost point, with Kanto and Johto corresponding to Kanto and the southern-facing portion of Chubu respectively. Taking into account the distance between Sinnoh and Hoenn, then, it could well be that the people from Sinnoh only stopped fleeing when they could go no further, and only then planned to imprison the Golems rather than run from them. Alternatively, they might have planned to imprison the Golems as far from their master as possible, to lessen the chances of someone accidentally reawakening all four. These people either lacked boats or the means to transport the Golems across water, as otherwise they would have fled to other regions to escape the Golems (who would all be unable to cross water – Regice would trap itself in its own ice, Regirock would simply be weathered to nothing, and Registeel would presumably sink to the bottom of the ocean and be unable to climb out). This might be evidenced by the presence of Regigigas and the Golems in Unova in the Black 2/White 2 games, if we believe each regional game series represents an alternate timeline, as in that version of events they may have failed to contain Regigigas and subsequently fled the continent altogether). Either way, this would be a fascinating part of Pokemon world history.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

This wonderful piece of extremely niche nerdery was a fun read. It had a similar energy to that "hell is exothermic" joke, although I like this rather better.

Obviously not really fanfic, although I suppose you could frame it as an in-universe blogpost or somesuch. Maybe with a touch more irony about taking myths and legends as scientific facts or fussing about magic ice in a universe where living things regularly break the laws of physics as light entertainment. Might be fun!

Anyway, welcome to the forum, love the avatar.

 

[elementcollector1]

Glad to be here! This kind of thing is my specialty - wondering how the Pokemon world would actually function in terms of biology, physics, lore/history and sociology is a favorite pasttime of mine. (It helps that the Regi's have pretty well-established lore compared to other Legendaries...)

We also discuss this sort of thing pretty often over at the Project Pokedex Discord server - we're currently on Articuno. So far, current idea is that it uses something like the proton conduction found in natural sea ice to exhibit a Peltier effect in conjuction with sunlight while flying, creating a 'hot zone' on its back and a 'cold front' on its underside/in front of it.

That being said, I put this here as a 'nonfiction' work, which I think is within the rules? Not sure.

I've also done some more research on Regigigas and its lore, so I can add a few things to the backstory of the Golems.

-It's established during Platinum that Regigigas appeared in 'a flash of blue light', along with Regirock, Regice and Registeel to save a group of people native to Snowpoint City from a volcanic eruption. Given that Coronet shows no evidence of being a volcanic mountain (instead being more likely to be produced by tectonic fault action), and Stark Mountain off in the Battle Zone does show evidence of volcanic activity, it's a fair guess to say Stark Mountain erupted. I'd also very much like to know what that 'flash of blue light' was, as none of the four can learn Teleport or other similar moves. Scouring around for other Legends that might do it, the only one in Sinnoh associated distinctly with 'blue energy' is Dialga - but time travel doesn't necessarily make sense here. So... who sent the Regi Squad, and why?

-After this, Regigigas turned into a 'stone of life' (depicted in the anime as a cyan orb similar to the Blue and Red Orbs in Hoenn) and fell into a deep sleep. At this point, the Snowpoint Temple was built around it, and the people of Snowpoint briefly worshipped Regigigas for saving them before growing to fear it for its power. Regigigas was sealed inside the Temple, and the three Regi's that had accompanied it were spirited away to Hoenn (this is from Bulbapedia, but I can't for the life of me find direct confirmation of the source) to the Hoenn region, where they were also sealed. The people who did so left a message in the Sealed Chamber hoping that one day, someone would be able to tame the raw power of all four.

However, this (as stated earlier) seemingly conflicts with certain events in Platinum itself. Obtaining an event Regigigas will unlock sealed ruins in Iron Island, Mt. Coronet and Stark Mountain, leading to Regirock, Regice and Registeel respectively. Given that these were also sealed away, in different places, we would then have to conclude that there is more than one of each Regi - that is, that Regigigas made multiple copies. This was never explicitly contradicted (and in fact is supported in Pokemon Emerald, where Pyramid King Brandon owns a set concurrently with the one that is/was sealed around Hoenn). In addition, hacking a Cherish Ball into the game to catch the Regigigas in Snowpoint Temple with will lead to the game thinking that it is the proper event Regigigas, so multiple Regigigas don't necessarily need to exist as well.

The four also make a return appearance in Black 2/White 2, where a third set of the trio can be found in the Underground Ruins. Catching all three will lead to an encounter with Regigigas at Twist Mountain. However, this does not imply a separate Regigigas either: the Regigigas at Twist Mountain is not sealed, and while statues of its three creations are present, the door is already open when you get near and Regigigas awaits at the center, immediately reacting when you interact with it. This might imply that Regigigas somehow caught wind of someone reactivating copies of the Golems all the way over in Unova, and traveled there to discern why. This would in turn imply that Regigigas was permanently awakened during the events of Pokemon Platinum, and has resumed activity since.

Lastly, I did want to revisit just how dangerous towing continents could get for the rest of the planet. If Regigigas were to tow a landmass like Coronet (relatively small, assumed to be a tectonic plate boundary) across a planet with similar radius to Earth (6400 km), the fastest speed we know of that would be reasonably safe would be something like 16 cm/year (the current movement speed of the Pacific plate). This would take up to 125,663,706 years, placing Regigigas' birth/creation nearly as far back as the Weather Trio (~300 million years). If Regigigas were to pick up the pace (as Arceus watches over with a megaphone and a drill sergeant outfit), maybe by a factor of 1000, it would only take 125,664 years - but earthquakes would be happening fast and hard all over the planet. We don't know exactly how long Regigigas actually took to pull the continents into place, and it's presumably immortal, so it probably took the slow and safe route.

In terms of strength, we don't really know how much would be needed to move Mt. Coronet or other continents. In order to move a tectonic plate, you have to move another one into the spot left behind simultaneously, and how much raw force obviously depends on the size of the plate itself. It's been speculated that forcibly injecting fluids into the fault lines in a similar process to oil fracking increases lubrication between the two tectonic plates, allowing for 'slow' earthquakes that last for weeks to months and have no obvious effects. However, we can assume Regigigas isn't doing this, if only because it has no known method for doing so. Moving a boundary is a little harder, as you have to move two plates at once to keep both sides of the boundary consistent, doubling the potential for earthquakes from boundary slip. Regardless, even moving just Mt. Coronet halfway across the globe would take an enormous amount of strength, far more than any conventional rope material would withstand. I wonder if Regigigas could stretch out its own arms to use as 'ropes'? They look somewhat elastic, but that's pure speculation.


TL;DR - There are at least three separate sets of the Regi Trio, but only one Regigigas (until proven otherwise). Regigigas and one of these sets saved the people of Snowpoint City from the eruption of Stark Mountain at some long ago point prior to the events in the games. Regigigas is also incredibly stronk.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

Astoundingly high effort posting, mate, so I can't leave you without a reply, but my take on "making the pokémon world work" is to first accept that half of what we know about pokémon is unsubstantiated folklore, and the other half demonstrates base physics to not be in play (by breaking laws of conservation of energy/matter, among other things). Still, deep respect to you for this massive wordcount and attention to detail.

 

[elementcollector1]

Bet you didn't expect this to come back, did you?

So I did some more poking at Regice's biology - specifically, the goal this time was to determine how exactly it could, and I quote;

"...not melt even when it is immersed in magma." (Sapphire Pokedex entry)

(WARNING: A LOT OF THERMODYNAMICS AHEAD. FLEE NOW IF YOU DON'T LIKE MATH.)

A low thermal conductivity means that a material (such as Regice’s ice) can remain at a given temperature for longer periods of time, transferring less energy to the surroundings and ultimately withstanding harsh temperature conditions for longer. As such, it makes perfect sense that Regice’s constant temperature indicates an extremely low thermal conductivity, as it not melting ‘even when being submerged in magma’ according to the Pokedex would imply. For a practical demonstration of this, aerogel can be heated to any temperature the user likes – it will still be able to be picked up by the hands, as its incredibly low thermal conductivity means it will not transfer enough heat to burn someone in a reasonable amount of time. This, combined with the extreme thermal capacity of ice and water (requiring more energy for a given change in temperature) renders Regice an extremely poor conductor of heat, and stabilizes its temperature.

In fact, we can calculate just how difficult it would be to effect a change in temperature for Regice. Let’s assume Regice is currently exposed to 1200 ^oC magma, and is at the working temperature of -200 ^oC. Typical silica aerogels have a thermal conductivity between 0.01 – 0.02 W/m.K, a specific heat of 1900000 J/kg.K and a density of 0.00016-0.6 g/cc, compared to ‘normal’ fused silica’s 1.38 W/m.K, 2.202 g/cc and 772 J/kg.K – we’ll assume a similar ratio applies to ice’s projected values of 5.49 W/m.K, 0.934 g/cc and 732 J/kg.K at -200 ^oC, making them 0.04 – 0.08 W/m.K, 0.0000679 – 0.254 g/cc and 1800000 J/kg.K respectively, and take the lower values for simplicity of calculation.

What this all means is that a gram of ice aerogel would require 1.8 kJ of energy to increase in temperature by 1 ^oC, and would comprise a cube about 9.65 inches or 0.245 meters to a side. This cube of ice aerogel, according to the law of heat conduction, would have a heat flux in lava of (-0.04)*(1200-(-200)/0.245) = -228.57 W/m². Here, the negative sign means that T2 (the lava) is hotter than T1 (the ice aerogel cube), and thus heat flows into Regice to diffuse and balance the two. While this is not quite Regice’s situation, it does give a practical demonstration – most toasters run at about 1000 W of heat transfer through the air, and lava is considerably hotter – but because Regice is so resistant to heating, even lava takes a while to heat it up!

We can estimate Regice’s properties more accurately by assuming the aerogel is a ‘shell’ around a core of ice, all of which amounts to Regice’s overall body. By the rule of mixtures (M = X*d[sub]1[/sub] + (V-X)d[sub]2[/sub]), we can see that Regice’s bulk weight of 175 kg is composed of (X*100)% ice-XI (density estimated at 0.91 g/cm³ or 910 kg/m³) and (100(1-X))% aerogel (density 0.0000679 g/cc or 0.0679 kg/m³). This makes X equal to 0.192265 m³. As a sanity check, we can multiply X (expressed in cubic meters) by the density of ice-XI to get 174.96115 kg, and (0.764640864-X) by the density of our ice aerogel to get about 0.3885 kg. Adding these two weights together gives Regice’s overall weight of 175 kg, and seems reasonable – the extremely low-density aerogel occupies 74.9% of the volume, but only contributes 0.0222% of the weight!

The volume of the ice-XI core could be expressed as a smaller ‘core’ that occupies a uniform thickness inside Regice’s body. This core would have a scaled height of 1.14 meters (compare this with Regice’s overall height of 1.8 meters), meaning that (on average) it is 330 mm away from Regice’s ‘surface.’ Finally, we can plug this back into the equations for our aerogel ice cube earlier to get a better idea of how much it would take to melt Regice’s ‘core’, replacing the 0.245-meter thickness of the cube. Because the aerogel comprises the outermost shell of Regice, we can assume that Regice’s overall thermal conductivity and specific heat is limited by it – a ‘bottleneck’ of sorts on heat conduction, or the very definition of an insulating material.

k, T1 and T2 are still the same, so the heat flux is now -169.45 W/m². As with before, heat flows into Regice’s shell, but it’s now even slower. Moreover, given the surface area of 8.39484 m² (taken from the in-game model), the heating power reaching Regice’s core is about 1422.5 W. We can then plug this number into the equation for heat capacity to obtain the time taken to heat Regice’s core by 1oC given this heat input. Our heat, Q, is given by (175 kg)(1800000 J/kg.K)(1 K) = 3.15 x 10⁸ J or 3.15 x 10⁵ kJ. Dividing the former by the input power gives an overall time of 221,441 seconds, which is approximately 2 days, 13 hours, 30 minutes and 41 seconds – and that’s just to raise Regice’s overall temperature by a single degree Celsius! From this, then, the Pokedex entry from Sapphire becomes apparent:

“Regice cloaks itself with frigid air of negative 200 degrees C. Things will freeze solid just by going near this Pokemon. Its icy body is so cold, it will not melt even if it is immersed in magma.”

Incidentally, the researchers who managed to measure this would have had to wait about 1.4 years for Regice to melt (reaching 0^oC) if it were submerged in 1200 ^oC magma the entire time – small wonder they noted it doesn’t melt! Regice would have absolutely no problem dealing with all sorts of hot environments if this is how little it’s affected by its surroundings. Heck, we could even estimate a ‘lifespan’ of Regice assuming the global average temperature of 14 ^oC – by replacing T2 with this value, the heat flux into Regice’s core becomes just 25.94 W/m² for an overall power input of 217.76 W. This heating power would take about 9.16 years to melt Regice completely – smaller than one would expect, given Regice was made sometime during the last Ice Age (about 11,000 years ago), but this is assuming Regice has absolutely no ability to affect the temperature around it. Which, as a Pokemon, it very much does. Regice’s ability to chill the air around it, even despite its incredibly low thermal conductivity, makes it completely immune to the ambient temperature, because the chilled air (assumed to be the same temperature as Regice’s body) would provide exactly 0 watts of heating power, meaning it would take Regice an infinitely long time to melt. Even if Regice can maintain an air layer at this temperature of just one millimeter thickness, it would still be enough provided Regice can maintain it using its own power.

In fact, let’s assume Regice is maintaining a spherical bubble of air at -200 ²C. How much power is it expending to do so? This effectively becomes the ‘opposite’ of the equations from earlier – instead of calculating how much power is input into a material, we now have to calculate how much must be drawn out of it in order to regulate its temperature. This is actually the same equation as before, just with opposite places for the temperatures – T2 is now -200 ^oC, and T1 is 14 ^oC. Our new distance is then the radius of the sphere, which we’ll set to be 1 meter for simplicity. This gives a heat flux of 5.35 W/m², and given the sphere’s surface area of 12.57 m², an overall cooling power of 67.23 W assuming perfect efficiency. This means that Regice must expend 67.23 joules of energy every second maintaining the sphere of air’s temperature, amounting to a day’s caloric expenditure of about 1388 kilocalories – a pretty fair number! It’s unknown where Regice gets its energy from, as it is probably like its kin Registeel in that it has not been observed eating, but all Pokemon get such energy from somewhere so we can assume it’s governed by the exact same rules as a Glaceon using Ice Beam or something similar. This is also at perfect cooling efficiency, any deviation from which would mean that Regice is expending even more energy.

Lastly, this ice aerogel, while incredibly efficient at maintaining temperature, is likely not very physically strong. Silica aerogel has a shear modulus of 0.0030 GPa, compared to fused silica’s 212 GPa and ice’s 0.005 – 0.015 GPa – extrapolating this ratio as previously gives an estimate of 7.0754717 x 10^-8 to 2.12264151 x10^-7 GPa. This would make the ice aerogel incredibly brittle and easily broken – regular silica aerogel can be snapped with some effort by human hands, meaning ice aerogel would be far weaker and would likely be as easy as snow to crush, if not easier. This, then, would explain Regice’s weakness to Fighting-type moves, as well as possibly that of all Ice-type Pokemon if they’re dependent on something similar to safeguard whatever produces their ice powers.

TL;DR - Regice doesn't actually need any 'magic' to sustain its temperature... at least, in the short-term. Also, does this mean NeverMeltIce is the same stuff?

 

[kintsugi]

Hell yeah, I live for this stuff. I thought the bit about Regigags potentially moving mountains around to fix the topographical discrepancies in post was particularly clever, and I learned some fun new facts about ice today. Thanks for writing this up! I wish I had something more substantial to say here since this was a fantastic (and, as promised, lengthy) read, but it mostly just amounts to "this cool".