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Thousands of ice eggs of various sizes filled a beach in Finland over the weekend. According to experts, the unusual sight was caused by a combination of low temperatures, strong winds and waves. The BBC news website reported this today.
Ice balls
The ice balls appeared on Sunday on the beach on the island of Hailuto, which lies in the Gulf of Bothnia between the western coast of Finland and the eastern coast of Sweden.
Amateur photographer Risto Mattila captured the remarkable sight. “I was on the Marjaniemi beach with my wife. It was sunny, about -1 degrees Celsius and it was windy,” he said. “We saw this amazing phenomenon there; along the shoreline there were snow and ice balls,” he added.
According to Mattila, the size of the ice balls varied; the smallest were about the size of a chicken egg, the largest about the size of a football. “It was really an amazing sight. In the 25 years that I have lived in this area, I have never seen anything like it,” he said, adding that since he had his camera with him, he decided to photograph the ice eggs as a memento.
Mattila later shared the resulting photograph on Instagram.
Reason for the formation of these ice balls
According to BBC weather expert George Goodfellow, strong winds and low temperatures help the formation of the ice eggs. “Basically, it’s that they form from pieces of ice sheets that are tumbled by the waves,” he said. “They can grow when seawater freezes on their surface, and they also become smoother,” he explained, adding that smooth ice balls can end up on the beach at low tide or when they are blown there by the wind.
A similar phenomenon has been seen in Russia in the past. In 2016, huge ice and snow balls covered 18 kilometres of coastline near the Siberian Nyda. The smallest balls were about the size of a tennis ball, the largest had a diameter of about one metre. The photo was published on Instagram by The Economist magazine.
Photographs
