This is the biggest ice tower in the world... and it's in china

It is called Flamenco Ice Tower and has been erected by a group of students from the Netherlands in the Chinese city of Harbin

I'm sure many of you have heard of the Harbin Ice and Snow Sculptures Festival, where images and illusions based on pure ice are raised every year, which is a tourist attraction for the area. This has been the place chosen by a group of students from the Netherlands to erect what they consider to be the "biggest ice box in the world", although it is not really created with the kind of ice we can find in the freezer at home.

For years, this team at Eindhoven University of Technology has created a fibre-reinforced ice species:"Thanks to the contribution of cellulose fibres, we can create a building material that is up to 3 times stronger and more ductile than normal ice. Together with our construction system we can create as inflatable shells with the shape we want to apply layers of this fibre-reinforced ice. Once the layer is thick enough, the inner inflatable is removed leaving the structure in the air,"explains Yaron Moon, one of the young people involved in the project.

This type of construction and the way in which they are erected from scratch have many positive points in their favour: it is cheap, fast and materials are used that are sustainable with nature and can be easily obtained: after all, it is water and fibres.

However, the conditions for the project to work, whatever the shape, means maintaining an almost constant flow of material in the hoses, as stopping for a few seconds could cause the hoses to freeze in just half a minute. Hence the challenge of creating this project.

The height of this igloo species is 31 meters high, equivalent to a 6-storey building.