Bushwalk Australia

An early morning walk on a cold track provided much interest in the wide variety of patterns in iced over puddles. Trapped air especially gives an interesting curved formation.
The last photo struck me as a 'bigfoot' footprint.

COOL!

Nice photos.

Ok, so who has the scientific explanation for why the ice crystals grew in those patterns?

Neat. I've done a few of these over the years but always had trouble with the exposure. Maybe I was just walking too early in the morning . . .

north-north-west wrote:Neat. I've done a few of these over the years but always had trouble with the exposure. Maybe I was just walking too early in the morning . . .

The sun was pretty low, probably only half an hour above the horizon.

Just beautiful!

Great stuff! Thanks for sharing.

Fantastic shots

tibboh wrote:

north-north-west wrote:Neat. I've done a few of these over the years but always had trouble with the exposure. Maybe I was just walking too early in the morning . . .

The sun was pretty low, probably only half an hour above the horizon.

Thank you for destroying any pretensions I may have had to being even halfway competent with a camera.

Ice is nice....great capture tibboh.

This was taken on the Ramsheads about 9am just before Easter with my Samsung S4 - nothing fancy. It was -8 overnight.

Thank you all for the kind words. The ice was an unexpected highlight of my day.
The area where I walked was probably about -5 degrees or so the night before Mark. I wonder if temperature has any bearing on ice patterns? Some were almost like fingerprints in detail, but when you looked closely the angular ice crystal formation was still there.
I'm sure someone out there knows??

After looking at these ice patterns over the years if think what happens is that the pool freezes out from the edge in small sheets from points that have cooled faster than other parts. If it is cold enough for long enough the small sheets grow and eventually collide to form pressure ridges. What amazes me is the curved edges in the latter of your photos compared to the very linear, angular forms in the first two.

Influenced by water flow? Air current?

GPSGuided wrote:Influenced by water flow? Air current?

It was a very calm night with no breeze. There didn't seem to be any obvious water flowing (it was all frozen ) I like walking through mud ......when its been frozen, crunchy. There had been a bit of snow a few days earlier??

Wonderful! Definately worth getting up early for Tibboh.

I had similar conditions and patterns at The Walls some time ago.

Not having too much luck in finding a physical explanation of the various patterns seen on Google but found the following article. New insight into the wonder of ice formations.

http://my.ilstu.edu/~jrcarter/ice/radio/

Wow that's crazy!

It would appear that the triangular pattern induced by the ice needle is the primary pattern. The more rounded shapes may be related to water flow, ripple and other physical interactions. Not fully resolved yet.