A thousand icicles

On Friday I went back to the Carron Valley Reservoir again with a friend, this time on skis. As we wanted an easy day, we kept to the track that runs along just above the reservoir for much of the way, but with a few small hills to add a bit of interest to the skiing.

Sheltered corners of the reservoir were completely frozen, but there was enough movement in the water further out to break the ice and the middle of the reservoir was entirely free of ice. In the picture below, taken where the ice was breaking up, you can just see the open water beyond the ice.

After a couple of miles we decided to stop for lunch beside the reservoir. It was only then that we noticed what wind and water had done to the trees along the shoreline. The base of each one was completely covered in icicles of every possible description.

In the picture above, the pile of snow along the shoreline is in fact washed-up pieces of ice from the surface of the reservoir, covered in a thin layer of snow.

Some of the icicles were hardly thicker than pencils and pointing upwards instead of down. Others were curiously bent (some of these having formed around thin twigs which hardly show in the pictures). All the pictures below are the right way up.

Even each blade of grass was completely encased with ice.

On a different note, today, Easter Day, we stayed at home to watch the service broadcast from Paisley Abbey on BBC Scotland this morning. What a treat! ...and I'm not just saying that because I do the website for the director of music there. If you can access iplayer, it's available for the next week at www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01rp2sq and I strongly recommend it.

More ice

Last Wednesday was a cold bright day. The night before, we had passed a frozen waterfall high up on the Campsie Fells on our way home from an unsuccessful attempt to try and view Comet Pan-STARRS, so we decided to head out in that direction.

We were not disappointed, though the waterfall was in the shade, which is probably why the icicles had remained.

On our way home, later in the day, we were lucky to catch the few minutes when they were sunlit.

Our destination, however, was the Carron Valley Reservoir, where we went for a walk.

Here we found some amazing ice formations, including these ice stalagmites.

Several streams were encrusted with ice crystals. I thought these looked like the skeleton of a reptile.

Cracked ice on a puddle

At the edge of the reservoir, where the ice was moving and clinking in the wind, it appeared as if ice pans were beginning to form.

Curious short icicles in a stream

A trio of ice spikes

Just over a week ago we had the first really cold night of the winter, so I put some trays of de-ionised water on our front doorstep where there is a bit of a breeze.

The next morning one of the trays had three ice spikes in it. As these spikes form due to pressure of expanding ice forcing water up through the last point in the surface of the ice to freeze, I was surprised that such a small amount of water could support three spikes.

Two of the spikes were still open at the top when I took the above photo at 9:15am. The temperature continued to be below freezing point, and by lunchtime the spikes had grown further and then closed at the top, as can be seen in the photo below which was taken at 1:00pm.

Below is the central spike, 33mm high...

...and the left-hand spike.

Several ice spikes had also formed in an ice cube tray. The tallest can be seen in the photo below and was 44mm high.

More pictures can be seen in the ice spikes section of our main site.

Bending ice spike

One morning last week I found an ice spike about 45mm high growing in a small plastic tray of water which I had left outside.


This is nothing unusual (see our website ), but the behavior it exhibited later was new to me.

This ice spike was narrow in the middle, but widened out towards the top, terminating in a point. By lunchtime it was melting, and the narrow waist in the middle had become extremely thin. I decided to take some photos, so I picked it up, fearing it would break, and took a couple of shots.


Then I was completely astonished to see the spike BEND in the middle. Over a period of about 4 or 5 seconds, the top folded over until it touched the ice below.



It remained bent like this while I put it back on the ground. So this hinge survived bending through an angle of about 110 degrees. I believe ice can become less brittle with the addition of certain other substances, but this was not even tap water. It was de-ionized water into which some rain had fallen, so it was about as pure as you can get.

I have written to several scientists about it, and will let you know if I find an answer as to why this happened. After all, ice doesn't bend. Does it...?

Winter birds, and other things

Winter is always a good time to see unusual birds in the garden. This winter has been no exception as we have seen large numbers of redpolls and siskins, a fieldfare, 2 reed buntings and 3 waxwings. Apart from the waxwings (who were away before I had time for a decent photo) our most welcome visitors have been bramblings. We only saw these birds in our garden for the first time last winter, and then it was only the odd one or two birds. This year we have seen them every day, with a maximum of 10 birds present. There are 6 in the picture below, with 3 greenfinches at the top of the picture.

Bramblings are very similar to chaffinches in appearance, but with pink rather than white in the wings, a scaled pattern on the back, and a white rump.

Another unusual encounter on 22nd December was when this tiny goldcrest flew down beside me when I visited our local shopping centre.

On the same day I visited Victoria Park in Glasgow, where the swans and a number of tufted ducks were restricted to a small patch of open water, as the rest of the pond was frozen over.

For a couple of days at the end of December we had a freezing fog which covered everything in rime. Every plant seemed to have acquired thorns.

For more pictures, see the ice section of our website. This has just been given some extra publicity as the BBC mentioned it in their "Home Planet" programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday 11th January. Their reason was that they discussed ice spikes in the previous programme on 4th January. You can listen to both programmes by visiting the BBC Home Planet web pages.

Quite by chance this week I had the largest ice spike I had ever seen - 143mm or nearly 6 inches in height. The tray was 190mm in diameter.

Flight, but this time not birds. I caught this shot of a plane passing the moon.

After the snow 2

Now that we are suddenly having warm, sunny days that seem like summer, it is hard to remember that only 10 days ago I was cross-country skiing on the hills just half an hour's drive from our house.

When I wrote the previous entry entitled "After the snow," I didn't imagine that we would have so much more cold weather with plenty more snow although we mostly had to travel short distances to get to it. I spent so many days cross-country skiing that other things, such as keeping up this blog, got left behind.

Towards the end of February I visited Loch Lomond twice. Large parts of it were frozen, and this picture was taken on 21st February at Balmaha on the east shore.

Two days later, after a day's hill walking, we stopped off at Loch Lomond Shores at the south end of the loch. Here, too, the loch was largely frozen, though there was little snow on Ben Lomond in the background.

The Fintry Loup is a large waterfall in the River Endrick, and I visited it when it was still partly frozen. The amount of water coming down was considerably less than usual, not only because of the ice, but also because we had so little rainfall.

On 24th February more snow fell, and two days later we went skiing at the Queen's View by the road to Drymen. Unfortunately, further up the hill the snow was not only very deep but a hard crust had formed on it which we continually broke through, making skiing very difficult and tiring.

Better conditions followed and we had several magnificent days of skiing in the Carron Valley Forest. The hill in the distance is Meikle Bin.

The Carron Valley Reservoir, like almost every other area of water, was completely frozen.

In some places it was hard to tell where the land ended and the water began.

Although it appears that the ice is melting in the picture below, it was only surface water, and when we visited again a few days later the surface was once again solid ice.

The continuing cold weather produced many more ice spikes in our garden, especially after I discovered that using de-ionised water greatly increased the likelihood of spikes developing. This double spike appeared on 31st January.

Another strange phenomenon, which I began to see with increasing frequency on lochs and reservoirs which had been frozen for some time, was large stars forming in the surface of the ice.

There is an article about this in the Physical Review, published by the American Physical Society.

While the cold weather lasted, we continued to be visited by large flocks of redpolls. The largest count I made was 84 on 5th February. The numbers dropped off as the weather became milder, though a pair of redpolls was still present last week.

Now, by contrast, we have warm, sunny weather. There are new flower species coming out every day, and they are catching up fast.

Another ice spike

The season for ice spikes is here again. Yesterday morning one appeared in a plastic food tray which was nearly full of water and floating in one of the large trays of water we put out for the ducks. The spike was about an inch (25mm) high. This is what it looked like at 9am.

It was filled to the brim with water, and you can see that the water is bulging with surface tension slightly above the top of the spike. This is because the water in the tray freezes until only one point is left and, as water expands as it freezes, it gets pushed out of the hole and builds up a wall around it. As ice tends to freeze in a triangular pattern, these ice spikes tend to be triangular in cross-section.

Some time during the following hour, the water must have thawed enough to break the ice seal in the box. This caused the water level in the spike to drop. The following two pictures were taken at 10:30am.

I lifted the box out of the tray and held it up so the ice spike was against the sky. You can see that the top of each wall is curved upwards.

You can see several other entries about ice spikes in this blog, and we also have a section about ice spikes in our website.