GALLERY: As seasons change this phenomenon can produce great natural beauty
By Bob Confer,
The weather has been somewhat of a roller coaster over the past month. Days in the sixties have been quickly followed by days struggling to get into the thirties. It’s Mother Nature’s reminder that, in Western New York, winter never really goes away. Jack Frost can make an appearance at any time.
While that can make for some frustration for those who’ve felt teased by the warmer temps, it can lead to some wonderful beauty this time of year.
Under the right conditions – a mix of meteorology, hydrology, and geology – ice can seemingly grow from the earth, creating brilliant eye-catching gardens of tentacles of frozen water reaching from the ground.
These structures are called needle ice.
It forms when the air temperature is below 32 degrees and the ground temperature is above 32 degrees. It best appears when there is a stark difference between those temperatures. A few weeks ago, I saw an incredible amount of needle ice on the White Hill mountain range in Alma when the air temperature was just 17 degrees, only a few days after the high reached the mid-60s, which warmed the soil considerably. No doubt, many locals saw needle ice again earlier this week, when temperatures fell into the teens and twenties in the days that followed a deluge of warm spring rain.
March and April are the best time to experience this as the soil is saturated from snow melt and such spring rains. That subsurface water in its own almost imperceptible way is flowing this time of year along hillsides and mountaintops and, especially, where the soil has been cut for ditches or logging has recently occurred – you can see those areas weeping water or looking damp in the spring.
That water, exposed to the cold air, freezes and, as ice does, expands. It reaches upward to the open space of air. Then, the capillary action that had previously caused that water to flow keeps applying upward/outward pressure. As that water from the ground below contacts the air, it freezes. These spires of ice just keep on growing in length or height because of that pressure. It’s not uncommon to see needle ice reaching 3 to 4 inches in height. In the very porous soils of Iceland, they often see needle ice in excess of 8 inches!
Needle ice is a beautiful sight, especially on frigid mornings in full sun, as the formations are reminiscent of chandeliers and suncatchers.
As beautiful as it is, in can be destructive, albeit at a small scale. Where the formations are most pronounced, the ice can be forceful and lead to erosion, soil creep (a slow downward movement of soil in sloped lands), and things called nubbins (lumps or mounds created by needle ice pushing soil upward in flatter lands).
While we may not always appreciate putting on our coats just days after going sleeveless, there’s something to be said about the beauty of the land’s and water’s response to that situation. The next time you find yourself shivering on a springtime morning that’s in the teens and twenties, take to the hills and look for needle ice, the attractiveness of which can warm your heart.
Bob Confer is a Western New York outdoorsman to the extreme, sharing his depth and breadth of knowledge in this regular column. You can reach him anytime, Bob@Conferplastics.com
