If you live near a lake, river or have traveled by ship across the sea in the winter months, you may have seen pancake ice.
The Weather Channel Facebook friend Donald Mackenzie sent us the photo to the right of a Nova Scotia river in early Dec. 2014.
The circular slabs you see can range anywhere from one to 10 feet in diameter and up to four inches thick, typically forming in areas with at least some wave action and air temperatures just below freezing.
Pancake ice can begin as a thin ice layer (known as grease ice) or slush on the water surface, which accumulates into quasi-circular disks. The "lily pad," or raised-edge appearance of pancake ice, can form when each disk bumps up against one another, or when slush splashes onto and then freezes on the slab's edge.
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A more agitated ocean can also generate pancake ice, pushing the individual slabs over each other in a process called rafting, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. With time, the individual pancake ice slabs can freeze together to form a solid ice sheet.
Recently, pancake ice was reported in Scotland Thursday, December 18. The BBC reports that a River Dee Trust biologist discovered the round stacks of ice, thinking that "foam floating on the water started to freeze...and in the ensuing collisions became roughly circular."
See any pancake ice where you live? Upload your photos of this, or any other strange winter phenomenon to us at weather.com/photos, our Facebook page, or tweet them to us. We'd love to see them.
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