Some Washington State hair ice (Image: CHS)

(Image: CHS)

Have you ever encountered something that you have no explanation for? Maybe it’s the way someone is behaving towards you. Possibly, an object out of place that you swear was just here. Or, it’s a nature encounter that leaves you unsure of what you’ve just seen.

That’s how I felt on a morning walk in the forest outside Marblemount, Washington several years ago. The night before had been quite cold, and as I crept through the riverine forest of alder and cottonwood lining the Skagit River, leaves crackled underfoot. Like any forest, dead branches were strewn about, jettisoned by a combination of decay and force. And then something caught my eye: curling out of several branches about me, was something that looked like hair. I stopped and looked closer. I gently touched one of them and it was cold and melted against my warm fingers. Maybe this was just a weird ice formation – but why was it only on these dead branches?

Without sounding conceited, I am very confident in my naturalist abilities. I am good at identifying plants and animals and I can develop a good working theory on most animal behavior I witness. Rarely does an encounter on or near my home ground stump me. But here I was looking at this thing protruding from rotting sticks that I had never seen before. So, like any good naturalist, I took some photos and notes, and trotted off to try to figure out what it was on the internet.

As it turns out, I was not alone in surprise and uncertainty when encountering hair ice.

In 1918 a German meteorologist, Alfred Wegener, formally described this enigma, and suggested that it was not just a new ice formation, but that it could be related to fungus undoubtedly lurking in the damp, decaying sticks he found it protruding from. Wegener is now noted for his theory of continental drift, but he was also a polar explorer who knew a thing or two about ice and he was pretty sure he wasn’t looking at only frozen water.

It took almost 100 years for anyone to reveal more of this. Wegener froze to death in an ill-fated expedition to Greenland in 1930 and offered no more on the subject. But researchers blessed with more advanced tools were able to discern and confirm what Wegner had deduced. Fungus was key to the formation of hair ice.

In 2015, a team of Swiss and German scientists published research confirming fungus as the creator of Hair Ice, and that a specific species was likely the main source. When analyzing the fungal colonies present in the rotting wood supporting hair ice, the team wasn’t surprised to find multiple species present. However, only one species was in every sample: Exidiopsis effusa.

Hair ice, which isn’t so much a species of fungus as much as a watery byproduct, is rather cryptic. It forms at night and is only around for a few hours in most conditions, requires high humidity and freezing temperatures, and is mostly reported between 45 and 55 °N in broadleaved forests. So it’s not actually terribly surprising that it took so long to figure out what was causing these spectacular whorls to grow. And knowing the species responsible isn’t even that important, because E. effusa isn’t growing hair ice, it doesn’t make epicureans drool or mycological nerds swoon. What’s remarkable is the alchemy that combines to create hair ice in the first place.

Each strand of hair making up these icy growths is about 0.0008 inches thick and can extend to eight inches that are often curly and twisting but also quite brittle. During the right freezing conditions hovering right at 32° F, moisture is drawn out of decaying branches by ice on the surfaces of the wood and begins to form ice crystal structures. In the case of hair ice, these filaments appear to emanate only from the wood’s rays, porous structures in woody plants that run parallel to the growth rings.. What’s different is that, while ice can form filaments (you may have seen needle ice forming on soil before), these usually recrystallize into a more solid structure after a while. That doesn’t happen with hair ice, if it warms up, it melts away, but if the conditions are right, it can stick around for days instead of hours, exactly as formed.

When the team took a closer look at these filaments, they found traces of lignins and tannins. This makes sense. Trees use lignin and tannins to create structure and inhibit decay. Fungus that metabolizes wood needs to break down those structures and break down inhibitors. It appears that while the fungus helps form and grow hair ice, the metabolized lignin and tannins act like a hairspray and keep recrystallization at bay.

When I sent a photo to a friend, their reply was an emphatic “frozen fungal breath!” And I suppose that’s as good a way of describing it as any. Besides, as of now, we just barely understand how hair ice forms and what fungus is responsible – it’s still a mystery as to why E. effusa creates such alluring ice structures or if, in fact, it’s just a coincidence of conditions and metabolism.

In researching hair ice, I came across an interview on Livescience.com with Christian Mätzler, one of the authors of the study revealing E. effusa. Mätzler finished his interview with this statement: “I would like to let people realize that science can be unforgettably beautiful without any need for relevance for things that matter in human needs.” I couldn’t agree more.

Hair ice is also part of the special beauty of life in the north — it is found pretty much only between the 45th and 55th parallel.

After weeks of frozen weather, it’s finally started to warm up and rain again. That’s not ideal for finding hair ice anywhere near Capitol Hill, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be on the lookout for these little miracles if we get another spell of frozen weather. I’d suggest a visit to the Arboretum or Interlaken Park or you take a jaunt up near the mountains. I did manage to find some during the first week of February on a forest walk. Predictably, it was just freezing, it was early morning, and I was under a canopy of alders.

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