I appreciate all of your comments, it is nice to know that this blog is being read and enjoyed. Here, at the request of my sister Jeanne, the poet, is a description of how frost flowers form (WARNING TO READER: The following is not poetic!)

Frost flowers grow from water vapor onto new ice, nucleating in discrete “blooms” and then spreading out to cover the surface, if undisturbed. They form only when the conditions (relative temperature of water and air, humidity at the surface of the new ice, calm air) are right, because they require that the air immediately above the ice be supersaturated with water vapour. This happens when warm water is in contact with very cold air, and the evaporating water produces more water vapour than the colder air can hold. Thus, frost flowers are often found where cracks and leads have opened existing ice, allowing underlying (warmer) water access to the (colder) air and only a thin (new) layer of ice to separate the water and air. Thicker ice acts as an insulating layer and its surface is closer to the air temperature than to the water below.

Frost flowers are typically dendritic or rodlike in form, similar to snow and hoarfrost. We see individual ‘trees’, with branches spreading outward, and ‘feathers’, which are flat with branches lying in a single plane. The individual branches have six-fold symmetry, like a snowflake.

Snow also forms from water vapour, in the atmosphere of course, and generally on a nucleating particle such as dust. Water ice at typical temperatures and pressures is a hexagonal crystal, with a hexagonal basal plane, six-fold symmetry and growth favored in certain directions. Thus structures that grow from ice, such a snowflakes and frost flowers, tend to have hexagonal shapes or six-fold symmetry as well.

Frost flowers form only in low or no wind and are so delicate that the slightest breeze causes the larger ‘leaves’ to wave gently. Higher winds break them and carry them off, or bury them in snow. Collecting frost flowers has meant running a cold scalpel or spatula along near the surface of the ice, mowing them down like young trees and lifting them into a small container. Needless to say, this process breaks them up. Just the weight of more frost flowers added to the container breaks the lower ones, and of course they break more if the container is jostled in transport. (Never mind if it flies over a few bumps on a skidoo!) If not handled carefully, a full container at the collection site becomes half a container by the time it reaches the lab, proof that potato chip (crisp) bags may actually have been full when packed and “settled” in transport. (I know this has been the source of some debate.)

A highly saline brine also forms on the surface of new sea ice, and is wicked up by the growing frost flowers. Hence the frost flowers on sea ice are very salty. Because they are so delicate and so saline, they could be a major source of sea salt aerosol, which can be carried quite far by the wind. This is one of the reasons we are interested in them.

OK, Jeanne, your turn. I see so much here in the Far North that suggests poetry… the Northern Lights … more stars than you could ever count … a cold so sharp it takes your breath away … the snow blowing across the frozen bay, and the amazing waves left in its wake, the elusive red foxes that live on the sand dunes, the frost flowers themselves … all of it. But I couldn’t write a poem about it if my life depended on it. Can you?