Sometimes, Needle Ice is what.
Mom and I were returning from visiting dad when I noticed this outside their house.
As with the Ice Flowers, chance favors the prepared mind. It also helps that I look down a lot.
The simple explanation is that capillary action pulls the water out of the ground and it freezes when it hits the air. But that is not sufficient to explain why there are needles. Dr. James Carter has a number of web pages on the subject, including the one I linked to above, and in an email exchanged noted that the detailed scientific explanation involves "Ice Segregation", a process previously unknown to me.
Instead of trying to explain it here, I'll again link to one of Dr. Carter's web pages on the subject, as he does a much better job explaining it than I could. Of course, any errors in this post are mine alone.
In these images you can see how the ice lifts the soil and plants, in this case moss. This leads to erosion as the soil is now loose and when the ice melts it can easily be blown or washed away.
This is similar to the phenomena I noted in the Policy Park Fossil Beds post that I witnessed eating away at the stream bank, although that was likely not needle ice.
Tis the season for all manner of interesting ice phenomena, such these needles, the aforementioned ice flowers, and things I've yet to see such as hair ice and pebble ice.
So keep looking down.
No comments:
Post a Comment