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. Continue reading →