Ice Circles

By Anupum Pant

Perfect circles of ice have been seen spinning on top of water bodies for quite some time. They aren’t perfectly round most times. Recently, in the month of November last year, a huge 17 meter spinning ice disk was spotted on the river Sheyenne in North Dakota.

Several such ice disks have also been seen in the past in Canada, England and Sweden. Similar ice swirls were also seen in the Charles river, Boston. Some times they are huge, other times you see a number of tiny clusters of such ice swirls.

As always, even ice circles aren’t the work of aliens or government spies. It is completely a natural phenomena which occurs when slowly moving water moves past an obstacle creating a slow moving eddy. In due time, and due to very low temperatures, ice circles form small and keep growing as rings of frozen water on the surface of the water body keeps adding to their diameters. Here’s a video of one such big, and almost perfect, ice circle which was spotted in Rattray Marsh, Canada.

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