Winter has arrived in the northern hemisphere From candy-cane snow rollers to fragile flowers, ice can take on magical, complex guises. Here are six ice phenomena that might catch your eye NewScientistAdventCalendar
. Their more common name derives from their appearing to follow the sun, like a dog follows its master. The best time to try to spot them is when the sun is close to the horizon, around sunrise or sunset.A truly rare sight, these beautiful but short-lived ice sculptures form when the sap inside plants freezes. This can happen when the air temperature is freezing, but the ground is not yet frozen. The sap inside long-stemmed plants expands in the cold, creating cracks in the stem.
Snow rollers are rare, with sightings every few years only when conditions are just right. First, there needs to be a thin surface layer of wet snow. Underneath that, there has to be a layer of powdery snow or ice so the surface layer can lift up and roll as the wind blows without sticking to it. The wind must have a Goldilocks element to it, too – it must be strong enough to lift and roll the snow, but not so strong as to blow the roller away.
Because the interlocking patterns of crystals grow in size and complexity, some nickname the phenomenon “frost on steroids”.Graupel is perhaps the ultimate whimsical weather phenomenon, a case of unorthodox snow that forms inside a cloud. More precisely, it involves supercooled water droplets condensing on top of falling snowflakes. The droplets freeze, and as they do so they change the shape of the snowflakes, turning them into small squishy balls or pellets.
For this to succeed, the tiny droplets of cloud or fog must be supercooled – in other words, cooled to below freezing point but able to stay liquid. When these droplets then come into contact with any cold object, like a parked car, they immediately freeze on to it. Rime on snow crystals seen through an electron microscope . If a crystal is entirely covered by rime, it becomes graupelLasting fog can lead to huge build-ups of rime. When it forms from supercooled water vapour turning directly to ice, “it looks like spiky, sparkly crystals”, says Deems, but if the process involves tiny droplets freezing, the rime has a chunkier consistency because the resulting ice crystals are randomly oriented.
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