My work has headed in a slightly different direction over the last couple of weeks, we’ve become much more interested in the nano-scale silicon spikes I described here . We are now pretty sure we can tie together the ice spike phenomenon with the silicon pillar spikes. We have good reason to believe the spikes will grown on some other materials as well.
There are still more details to work out, but there should be a journal paper coming soon from this. Details of the work will appear here as soon as the paper is out.
do let me know when it comes out!