Originally published at: Waterfall produces perfect spheres of ice (video) | Boing Boing
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Goodness gracious!
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Very neat. The related phenomenon that creates giant circular ice islands in rivers is similarly fascinating.
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Ouch! Watching him keep putting his hands in the ice cold water and handling the ice balls made my fingers ache!
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These are clearly iceweasel eggs.
Also, previously:
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Shocking footage shows mother nature stockpiling munitions for sneak snowball attack.
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But why are they so very nearly the same size?
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Produced by the same eddy?
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Gonna be ruined by instagram influencers in 5…4…3…
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Years ago at Devil’s Postpile in CA I saw a basalt ball that had been created by moving water. A boulder washing downstream in a flood had fallen into a recess in harder rock in the riverbed. There it tumbled for who knows how long, becoming a sphere by the time they found it and moved it to their little museum. I remember it as about a foot in diameter.
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I guess my mental picture of, they start as large irregular pieces of ice and gradually become smaller spheres, is wrong. Rather the point is that the water is quite literally 0C and so the pieces of ice are both shrinking and growing continuously. At which point, whatever initial condition of the piece of ice gradually becomes irrelevant, and the limiting shape is somehow determined by the eddy. I wonder what factors determine its size; perhaps all such water ice balls limit to this size?
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Please; that’s Eddie.
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If Rambo had known that…
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