Some environmentalists believe industrial oil is to blame.
Nature knows how to surprise no worse than a person. Residents of St. Petersburg share photos of an interesting natural phenomenon on social networks: ice balls with a diameter of 5-10 centimeters covered part of the Gulf of Finland, and not for the first time.
While Internet users admire this miracle of nature, experts disagree on what caused the appearance of ice balls. Some believe that the waves of the bay rolled the snow that had packed on the shore into snowballs, which later froze. The only question is why are all balls the same size? Other scientists believe that these ice balls are in fact ordinary stones. That is why they took on an ovoid shape.
Instagram users are happy to share colorful pictures Photo: Yuri Shakhov.
One of the most popular explanations is that the process of ice formation in salt water is different from fresh water. It goes through three stages. First, it turns into "ice lard" - a slurry of fine-grained ice. Whether such fat becomes a small ball of ice depends on the strength of the wave. If the sea is calm, there will be a continuous ice cover, if the waves are strong, then the "fat" gets knocked into lumps. So spherical formations are born.
Photo: Alexander Abrosimov / kp.ru
Ecologist Ilya Leukhin believes that this process may be associated with industrial oil:
- Based on the fact that sea water is a solution of a huge amount of salts, then its crystallization during freezing proceeds unevenly. Crystals are built around the core. In our case, water became in a crystal lattice around a gas bubble or a hydrophobic liquid, a drop of which in water has a rounded shape. An example of a water-insoluble liquid is oil, it just has a perfect circle in water. Since the freezing point is probably higher than that of water, it turns out that water molecules lined up around the oil spots and formed a spherical body.
Promotional video:
Photo: Alexander Abrosimov / kp.ru
And while scientists are wondering where the balls came from, people are taking beautiful photographs of this natural miracle. In 2014, a photographer from Tallinn, Alexander Abrosimov, saw such a phenomenon for the first time in his life. As a souvenir, he made a whole series of unusual photographs.
ANASTASIA BIRYUKOVA