Frost Flowers on Christmas Eve

We were taking a drive around the neighborhood today and noticed a strange phenomena in a field under an oak tree. There were a lot of white something-or-others attached to the plant stalks. Cheryl thought it looked like a bunch of styrofoam in the field. I got out of the car and walked up to one of the plants and realized it was ice attached to the plant stalks!

They formed really nice patterns so we went back to the house and got the camera. At first I wasn’t sure if it was frost or snow that had blown on the plants and hadn’t melted because of the shadow. The problem with that idea is that we hadn’t had any precipitation, just a hard freeze. Also, the ice was only on these particular type of plants and was formed into paper-thin ribbons. Evidently these plants pull the moisture from the ground and when it’s this cold the water forms into ice and breaks open the stalk. The process keeps repeating (through capillary action) until more ice is built up on the outside, forming these paper-thin ribbons of ice. On one of the closeup photos you can see bits of the stalk at the end of the frost flower.

• Here are some more pictures I took of these “frost flowers”.
• Here is a reference I found which explains the phenonmena.