Being southern California types, we generally experience the solid phase of water (i.e., ice) only in the form of ice cubes or that funny white stuff on the outside of our frozen pizza cartons. To see it outside, without any nearby man-made apparatus to create it, is a bit jarring for us. Some of the later-rising folks out here think that naturally-occuring ice is a kind of urban legend — you see, if you don’t get up until 9 or 10 in the morning, you’ll never see frost or ice around here!
Well, here’s the photographic proof that ice really does occur in this neck of the woods. You easterners and northerners can laugh at us all you want — for us, a “cold snap” is when the temperature dips below 60F. And that’s plus 60F, not those horrifying minus temperatures you’re dealing with. I like our version of a cold snap much better…
The three pictures above are plants covered with frost, of course. But the two at right probably aren’t so identifiable. It’s a sort of upside-down icicle (the closest we’ll ever get to a real icicle), formed on a rock just below our bird water’s dripper. One drop of water falls about every 5 seconds onto this rock. With the sub-freezing temperature, the ice seems to have slowly accumulated until it formed this marble-sized protuberance. I was mostly interested in the strange striations that appear in it — I’ve no idea what caused them to form…
No comments:
Post a Comment