Ice Zoom

From 50 miles away, glaciers may gleam, but ice's intricacy is expressed simply as a reflection of the underlying landscape and overlying light.






A cool thing about frozen water is that sometimes you can glimpse the crystal structure on a pretty large scale, no magnification required. Here on this beaver pond, the freezing surface is only a few millimeters thick, but there are lines a couple of feet long, shooting out in all directions, weaving a web over the whole surface. Between the lines, smooth mirrors of the frozen stuff.






On another beaver pond, the glassy interstices were few. The whole surface was adorned with slivers and feathers of ice.






Meanwhile, by a stream, the spray of a small fall gets locked to a twig in blobular clusters. Not crystalline at all to the naked eye, more like ginseng roots or some other living thing.