Everyday mysteries.
Things out in the world that made me go "huh... that's weird". (Especially things that violate my understanding of how the world works!)
If you post to the #HuhThatsWeird hashtag, I might boost it! ❤️
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No ice spikes so far this year. Not much rain and snow, so I guess not too surprising...
...but also, 4 of the 6 posts I checked have ruptured! I don't have ready access to inspect the others, but I wonder if most of them are like this now.
(Note to self: Outer diameter of posts is about 48 mm, if I want to try replicating this at home.)
The posts in this chain link fence are 4 foot long steel tubes, with walls about 1/8 inch thick. Pretty sturdy.
...except they filled with water, which froze to ice, and that ice has about 10% more volume than the water, and ice apparently don't care overly much about how the steel feels about the matter.
I feel like this might have some bearing on why I've been seeing the weird ice spikes growing out of these posts. Lotta pressure.
@WanderingBeekeeper For examples of the stairsteps, take a look at these two, which I find absolutely wild:
@WanderingBeekeeper One thing I'm struggling with is how some of them end up in such weird shapes, with those stair-steps.
Extrusion of a column (freezing from below as it is pushed up) doesn't seem to match, as there should be a good deal of friction against the metal. Maybe the pressure can overcome that?
A hollow tube freezing at the lip might make sense, but then how does it go from wide to narrow to wide again? Or is that just erosion from sublimation and melting?
@infernusgoatus Yeah, it seems likely that they form similarly to other ice spikes... but I'm having trouble figuring out how they get those shapes.
In particular, it seems weird to me that they would grow up the inner wall of the metal post, and then widen and narrow so dramatically...
So are these kin to the ice spikes seen in ice cube trays? They're so big! And they're not freestanding, but are instead all stuck to the inner face of the posts.
How would they grow? It looks like they were pushed up out of the post and then maybe went through some freeze/thaw cycles that created those stairsteps, and the ridges on that 4th pic in the first post.
I really wish I could set up a camera to capture some growing.
Maybe I could set out a hollow post to grow my own?
Every upcicle is against one wall of a hollow metal post about a meter tall. I see water in there, but maybe 15–20 cm down. (Maybe that's ice too?)
The ice inside the post generally has a lenticular cross section with one arc flat against the metal, although one had a triangular shape.
They protrude up to 8–10 cm, often with one or more stair-steps away from the center, sometimes with an extremely fragile, narrow neck. The upper parts may be round (unlike the part in the post) or flat.
