Bizarre Natural Phenomena Vol. 60 - When The Seas Decide To Make Snowballs (Natural Snowballs Form In Siberia)

Hello there and have a great new week, everyone! Welcome to another new strange phenomenon! This time I 'll be taking you to far away and cold Siberia of October 2016. Here we are in the freezing cold Arctic Gulf of Ob (Western Siberia), near the town of Nyda. Everything is covered in snow as far as the eye can see and right there where the waves crash onto the frozen shores we make out not one, not two, but thousands of white round balls, arranged one next to the other as if they are some sort of ammunition store for an imminent snowfight (If the Night King was coming, I doubt whether these would stop him and his army of the dead). 

Image from: maxpixel.net

What could it be?

Cannonballs covered in snow? Some kind of huge arctic turtles laid their eggs here? Was there a ship filled with balls that sank and all its load got washed out in the shore and froze?

Go on, touch it!

The balls are thick and cold. We push a little harder and they seem to fall apart.

They're snowballs!

Snowballs? How did they form in the first place? 

Magic? Kids who wanted to play? Aliens?

Nature! In cold areas when the water, terrain morphology and wind work together, they can create snow boulders that reach sizes from a tennis ball to a basketball (or sometimes as long as one meter in diameter). In the town of Nyda (Gulf of Ob), residents reported seeing boulders with diameters of a few centimeters to even a meter, stretching at a distance of almost 18 kilometers. [2, 3]

When temperatures fall below zero, sea water starts to freeze. This first ice crystals formation is called sludge ice or slob ice. As the waves crash onto the shore, the water and wind start rolling those pieces of ice back and forth onto the beach. Imagine two hands trying to mold balls of jelly, with the seawater being the one hand and the shore being the other. And then the tide kicks in and spreads those pulpy cold masses of ice along the shore. Then the tide retreats and the cold temperatures work with snowfall and wind to help our squishy blobs slowly evolve into thicker and bigger balls of snow. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5 (first video)]

Watch this video to get a better idea on how these bizarre boulders form:

Amazing! Does this happen every year?

Unfortunately no! This phenomenon is very rare as a lot of factors need to coincide to make it happen. But it does not happen on Siberia solely. The residents of Nyda may have been lucky to witness it for the first time in 2016, but such formations have been reported in the US (Lake Michigan and Sebago Lake in Maine) and Stroomi beach (Estonia, Europe) some years earlier.

Look what happened in Lake Michigan back in 2015:

References

[1] siberiantimes.com
[2] livescience.com
[3] sciencealert.com
[4] smithsonianmag.com
[5] curiosity.com

Thank you so much for your time!

Until my next post,
Steem on and keep smiling, people!