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Winter wonderland- ice spikes
shootuadeal
Member Posts: 5,242 ✭✭✭✭
Had a dense fog this morning and warmer below freezing Temps, that usually creates quite a scene on everything.
These are the trees behind my house, what I find unusual is that instead of an even coat everything is covered in small ice "spikes". Kind of cool. Anyway, enjoy your weekend everone.
Comments
How awesome! Isn't Mother Nature a superb artist?
We call that Hoarfrost way up here in the great unwashed wilderness. Gorgeous stuff.
Cool for sure! Great Pics thanks for sharing.
I love the look but hate cold weather and not too fond of wicked hot either LOL
We had about a solid week of that here a couple weeks ago, Fog freezing on all the trees and shrubs. Kept the shutterbugs busy.
I’ve never seen the spikes like that before. What causes that?
I don't know what causes them to make spikes like that. Earlier in the week it was cold, like -5 or but warmed up about 10 degrees more each day until this morning it was 23 with dense fog. Whenever it warms up with fog it does this.
Thanks, I’m originally from upstate New York and I’ve never seen it like that .
Guess they call it soft rime ice. Or Hoar ice as nanuq stated about.
Still doesn't explain exactly why it forms like it does.
I learn something new every day. Thank you for the info .
This is what happens when wet snow sticks to the frost!
🙂🙂🙂
Any irregularity on the stem forms a node where ice can start to grow (more exposed to cold air than the flat branch). Ice is a highly regular 6 sided crystal and once a crystal forms it’s ridiculously easy for another to form on it. It can only attach at 60 degree angles, to the sides so those form branches leading away. On those branches more branches will form at 60 degree angles and eventually the branches get thick enough they run into each other and clump into triangular points leading away from the main branch.
Ever see a water bottle sitting still on a 15-20 degree day, still in liquid form? Give it a little tap and you will see this freezing pattern shoot through the water and freeze the whole thing in seconds. Like ferns growing making points.
I've seen and duplicated the water bottle thing. As long as there's no vibrations (can't do it in a freezer) it's fairly easy to do but very cool to show people.
I would take a bottle of Dasani and set it out back when it's 15 below, give it an hour, it would still look like liquid water. Give it a small shake or tap the sides and watch it turn to ice in 2 seconds. Pretty cool actually.
Yes exactly, you see the "ferns" of ice growing through the hyper cooled water before your eyes.
Water is strange stuff. It's one of the only materials that gets bigger as it freezes, and that's because the H2O molecules are SO polar. In liquid form they rattle around randomly, partying with any other molecule that happens by, and the covalent bonds at the tips of the molecule aren't strong enough to overcome the vibration and Brownian motion of the other water molecules near by so they stay liquid. But when they cool down the ancillary motion of the molecules diminishes and the covalent bonds take over, and they form lattices with the water molecules next door. That lattice shape takes up more room than the random water molecules bouncing around from party to party, and before you know it all the water molecules have frozen into lattices with their neighbors, taking up more room than the liquid water ever could, and cracking your engine block.
In the wild, there is nothing to constrain their growth so they spike out from branch irregularities into pointy crystals, waiting for other forlorn and lonely water molecules to wander by and join the structure. These are perfect examples of the fractional geometry of nature ... the molecules look the same at any scale of magnification.
My local watering hole has a beer cooler that gets too cold in the winter months and when they pull out a long neck, it looks liquid, but as soon as you open it it will freeze up unless you drink it really fast....
That is so cool.
Always really cool stuff going on in nature if we take the time to look at it it's amazing what you can see.
Pun intended?
That’s pretty but please keep it there. Brrrrrh