Category: Photos
Caution!
February 1st, 2012Hoar. It's just a white coating on things, so why does it make everything look more interesting?I saw this hoar coating on a plastic trash-can lid:The hoar frost on the lid had various whirls, just like I've seen on the plastic surfaces of car… more »
Slush Fingering and Other Pond Patterns
January 19th, 2012Slush Fingering and Other Pond PatternsHere in the Pacific Northwest, we just had our first snowfalls of the season. On the weekend, we had 1 – 2 inches. This was followed on Wednesday by what the Seattle Times newspaper was calling a “megastorm”. Bu… more »
Snow on a Freshly Frozen Pond
January 15th, 2012Back when I was doing post-doctoral work in Boulder, Colorado, Charlie Knight, the head of my lab, introduced me to strange ice phenomena. If the weather had been sub-zero for a few days and we got some snow, he would drive us out to some shallow ponds t… more »
Fun with windshield ice
January 11th, 2012In my last post, I pointed out that you can determine the crystal orientation in a film of ice by looking at hoar-frost that sprouts from its surface. Here's another way, but it only works if the ice is on glass. For example, here's ice on my windshield,… more »
Choppy waves
January 11th, 2012I thought this hoar frost pattern looked like rough seas. I see choppy, cusp-like waves down there. [pic 1 large view]Not having any pictures of rough seas, I hopped in our bathtub and kicked my legs around to make waves. Perhaps you can see a litt… more »
What We Sometimes Miss
March 8th, 2011For the first few years in which I would excitedly go out on frosty mornings to photograph ice formations, I never paid any attention to frost on car bodies. Sometimes I would notice something on our car window, but that was basically it – I was essentia… more »
An Ice Vase Sprouts From a Bathtub
February 6th, 2011Someone recently sent me a beautiful image of an ice structure in the shape of a vase. The vase in that case had somehow sprouted out of a frozen birdbath. The thing reminded me of an ice vase I once found on an old plugged-up bathtub in a farmer’s field… more »
Ice Forms on Slow-moving Water I: Caterpillars and Cellular Dendrites
January 15th, 2011During my last winter in Japan (2009-2010), I would walk around a neighborhood park on frosty mornings, looking for interesting ice forms. It was in this park that I found one rock (only one!) that on some mornings would sprout hair-like ice, arising fro… more »
More Tales of Mystery and Observation
December 1st, 2010When I stepped out early Saturday morning, the air seemed relatively warm, particularly compared to the cold snap we had last week. Indeed, it was much warmer, and yet the parking lot in our apartment complex had a glaze that was much more dangerous than… more »
BEDFISH: Revising an old Idea for Classifying Surface Ice Forms
January 31st, 2010 It often seems like people refer to any kind of ice stuck on something as frost. If one looks in books or the Internet, one can usually find a specific term for the many different and interesting ice formations, but a term used by one group of people… more »
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