Ice Spike
An inverted icicle of ice projecting upward from the surface of frozen water.
An ice spike is an ice formation, often in the shape of an inverted icicle, that projects upwards from the surface of a body of frozen water. Ice spikes created by natural processes on the surface of small bodies of frozen water have been reported for many decades, although their occurrence is quite rare. A mechanism for their formation, now known as the Bally–Dorsey model, was proposed in the early 20th century but this was not tested in the laboratory for many years. As of 2013, a number of photographs of natural ice spikes have appeared on the Internet as well as methods of producing them artificially by freezing distilled water in domestic refrigerators or freezers. This has allowed a small number of scientists to test the hypothesis in a laboratory setting and, although the experiments appear to confirm the validity of the Bally–Dorsey model, they have raised further questions about how natural ice spikes form, and more work remains to be done before the phenomenon is fully understood.
Quick Facts
- Elemental source
- Ice; Cold
- Secondary potential
- Freeze Status
Lore & Background
Ice spikes have been reported as a rare natural phenomenon for decades. In the early 20th century, O. Bally and H.E. Dorsey independently proposed the mechanism now known as the Bally–Dorsey model. While often associated with small bodies of water like bird baths where freezing is rapid, they can appear on larger frozen surfaces. A notable account from 1963 by Canadian Gene Heuser described hiking across frozen Lake Erie and seeing 'small pinholes' through which water was forced under pressure to spout up, creating five-foot-high (1.5 m) 'frozen spurts that looked to him like telephone poles standing straight up all over the lake'. These formations can vary in shape; beyond the classic spike, they have been reported as ice candles, towers, vases, or even inverted pyramids. The formation process relies on water expanding by 9% upon freezing. If a small hole remains in an otherwise frozen surface, expanding water below pushes up through it. As the extruded water hits cold air, its edges freeze while the center stays liquid, creating successive layers of ice that grow upward into a tube.
Reader's Guide
To understand ice spike formation, one must observe the expansion of water by 9% as it freezes. The process typically begins when surface water nucleates around irregularities at a container wall. If the crystal's c-axis is not vertical, basal planes intersect the surface along lines perpendicular to the axis, causing ice needles to propagate across the surface and leave only a small triangular hole (often formed by crystallite curtains joining at 60-degree angles). As freezing continues below, water is pushed up through this hole. If the extrusion rate matches the freezing rate at the lip, an upward-growing tube forms with hexagonal or triangular cross-sections. Artificially, these can be grown using distilled water in plastic ice cube trays; impurities in non-distilled water inhibit formation by concentrating in the unfrozen droplet and reducing the freezing rate. In nature, exceptionally large spikes may require mechanisms like convective flow to remove impurities. As of 2013, photographs of natural spikes had appeared online, allowing scientists at Caltech under Kenneth G. Libbrecht to test these hypotheses in laboratory settings.
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