Jump to content

What Is It?


Airdale

Recommended Posts

My wife was down checking out the flow in our creek this afternoon and noticed this deposit of something she didn't recognize at the base of a large old fir tree.

IMG_20180327_162229.jpg

 

Linda said it has a crystalline look and you can see the bluish tinge in part of it. She wears a size seven shoe. Anyone know what this is?

 

Edited by Airdale
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Not trying to be wise but I would say to look up. Could be white sap splatter from not a small broken, or partially broken, branch?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think Norse has the right of it. We've been up here for nearly a dozen years and haven't seen anything like it before, even though a great deal of time in the warm months is spent in the creek bottom. Just keeping the Braddock at bay can be a full time job. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

BFF Patron

I am guessing the temperature is below freezing given the boots in the picture and what looks to be ice crystals on the boots.     If so the patch could be frost heaving.    I see that in my area when the temperatures get above freezing for a short time during the day and at night the temperature is below freezing.    Like the pictures it is often in a patch of deep pine or fur needles.     The ice crystals get in a cycle where they freeze and expand at night, partially melt during the day, and freeze again at night.   If this cycle happens often enough, then you see the piles of crystals  pushed up where there is a source of water underneath.   That source seems to be the needles themselves who retain the water like a sponge. The needles act as a insulator also and separate the patch from the warmer dirt below.  But I have seen the same thing in mud on a smaller scale.       I have seen similar picture taken on Mars which seemed to have the scientists puzzled for a while.     Sometimes when you are my age you have experienced things much younger people have never seen.     That applies to NASA scientists too I guess.  .   

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It wouldn't be frost, SW, the photo was taken at 1622 on a sunny afternoon and while it may have been slightly below freezing during the night, it would have been for a short period. Daytime temps have been in the mid forties to mid fifties; the coldest temp in the last 24 hours was 35 F and at 1407 it is 52 F as I type this. We still have several inches of snow cover even with the warming temps as we had over two feet built up. Linda had to walk over 200' through the snow in the back yard to get down to the creek. The sample was at the base of a large fir in an overgrown portion of the creek ravine that we've only begun to clear, so there would have been little snow build up, and what there was has already melted off.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Just a stab in the dark, but ... do you have aircraft that fly over your property? The substance LOOKS like ice crystals, but it has that bluish tinge to it. I'm thinking leaked liquid from an airplane sewage tank. It freezes at high altitudes and falls. The blue colour could be from the disinfectant that's used in the storage tanks. There may be more around the property, if that's the case.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

What's amazing to me is I was researching a bit more on 'angel hair' this morning and thought it might be the result of that kind of aircraft residue. In my searches I came across that very thing about the blue disinfectant. Great minds........etc :) 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

BFF Patron

CM you could have nailed it.    You can get enormous chunks of ice build up on airplanes when a dump valve leaks.    That lav water is colored blue.    Blue water dripping is a hazard of doing walk arounds between airline flights.       I recall someone having a chunk fall off an airplane  come through their roof and land on their bed.    Yuck!    At altitude it would freeze well below zero and retain that temperature for a while after falling off.   Normally the chunks fall off when the airplane descends into warmer air.   

 

I have seen instances in nature where some sort of endothermic organic chemical process was going on where a rotting log was frost covered when the air temperature was above freezing.      Endothermic chemical reactions adsorb heat rather than create it.     

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
Guest
This topic is now closed to further replies.
×
×
  • Create New...