English: Frost flowers growing on young sea ice in the Arctic. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Frost flowers are strikingly beautiful natural formations that can be seen, when conditions are right, floating like lilies on the sea. They are “commonly found growing on young sea ice and thin lake ice in cold, calm conditions” and have “extremely high salinities and concentrations of other sea water chemicals” (so says Wikipedia).
NPR’s Robert Krulwich waxes poetic on frost flowers in an account of a grad student’s first encounter with them:
When the air gets that different from the sea, the dryness pulls moisture off little bumps in the ice, bits of ice vaporize, the air gets humid — but only for a while. The cold makes water vapor heavy. The air wants to release that excess weight, so crystal by crystal, air turns back into ice, creating delicate, feathery tendrils that reach sometimes two, three inches high, like giant snowflakes. The sea, literally, blossoms.If I could book passage on a boat and see a frost flower meadow burst into being, magically growing out of the empty, frosty air and spreading as far as my eyes could see, would I want to see that?You bet I would. Who wouldn’t?
It turns out, interestingly, that each frost blossom – despite its salinity and temperature – plays host to as many as a million bacteria!
