Hair ice

No, that's not a hairy branch but rather an astounding kind of ice formation called "hair ice" ("haareis" in German). Illinois State University professor James Carter of the Geography-Geology Department, created a page about this natural wonder that includes many photos of these marvelous ice growths, sometimes called "silk frost" or "cotton candy frost."The photo above is by Rick Eppler of Vancouver Island, Canada. From Carter's "Ice Formations on Dead Wood" page:

While the term frost is used frequently as part of such names, these ice formations are not a product of frost.  Frost comes about by moisture from the air being deposited on surfaces.  As such frost is quite amorphous and would never appear as fine needles like we see here.  Hair Ice is ice that grows outward from the surface of the wood, as super-cooled water emerges from the wood, freezes and adds to the hairs from the base.

"Ice Formations on Dead Wood -- Haareis or Hair Ice" (via MAKE:)

• [Anonymous]

  I desire a time lapse video of this stuff forming… growing even.

• [phisrow]

  For anyone who has read “Roadside Picnic”, I recommend comparing this photograph to the description of the “cotton” in the plague quarter…

• [VBailey]

  I get what I call iceflowers that form from the base of stims of plants been collecting pics. I take every winter on my property

• [awwhoneybear]

  awesome!! what does it feel like if you touch it?

• [Pipenta]

  Oh I love this stuff. I’ve been taking a lot of winter walks the last couple of years, and photographing the ice I find. I haven’t seen hair ice, but I have seen needle ice pushing up from the ground. There’s a little river with a couple of waterfalls along my regular route, and I especially love the icicles that form beneath things like logs and ice sheets. They look like inverted mushrooms, because they widen as they get longer. And, of course, there are all kinds of interesting formations along little streams, as they rise and fall with the various melting cycles.

  I discovered this very website that is linked about two weeks ago. I think the niftiest formations pictured are not the hair ice, but the strange curls that come out of metal pipes.

  http://my.ilstu.edu/~jrcarter/ice/diurnal/

• [Beverly Stayart]

  Quite picturesque names for this, especially “cotton candy frost.”

• [skabob]

  If you loved hair ice, you’ll love hoars! There’s depth hoar, a favorite cause of slab avalanches; surface hoar, which is a re-frozen crust on top of the snow which can be quite beautiful; and road hoar… yep, I went there.

  http://www.avalanche.org/~uac/encyclopedia/

• [DarwinSurvivor]

  http://xkcd.com/258/