Hair Ice

With apologies to all those who come here looking for kid pics, I'm posting this image for my own enjoyment. I observed this strange ice formation a few days after Christmas, and took this very mediocre snapshot of it. I saw this in several areas near the house and along the road, in areas of chipped wood groundcover over mud. It looks like a thicket of ice tendrils growing upwards from the chips. Each tendril is perhaps 1/16" wide and up to three inches long. I assumed it was coming somehow from liquid water in the mud being forces upward through pores and freezing on hitting the cold air, but in one of the plate of shrimp moments, this article swam into my ken. I now think that I was seeing "hair ice".