All articles tagged with #brinicles
Originally Published 27 days ago — by Mental Floss
The article explores six unusual natural snow and ice formations, including brinicles, giant snowballs, snow rollers, penitentes, snow monsters, and pancake ice, highlighting their unique formation processes and the extreme conditions required for their creation.
Originally Published 2 years ago — by IFLScience
Brinicles are salty frozen fingers that descend towards the ocean floor in the Antarctic sea ice. They are formed when extra-salty brine leaks out into the open sea below the ice layer, sinking due to its weight and absorbing heat from the surrounding water. The result is a streamer of sinking brine that pulls a shroud of frozen seawater around itself as it descends, freezing anything unlucky enough to stumble into its path. Brinicles have more in common with hydrothermal vents than stalactites and could have played a role in the origins of life on Earth and other far-distant worlds.