🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: A physicist weighs in on the science behind the recurring natural phenomenon.
of such ice disks. They found that the icy visitors self-propel in warm water; as the ice melts, the cold water sinks and creates a vortex that causes the disk to spin.
But there’s a difference between how ice disks rotate in laboratory studies and how they rotate in nature, explains Paul Nakroshis, a physics professor at the University of Southern Maine: “That’s not what’s happening in the river situation.” In nature, ice disks aren’t surrounded by warm water. It’s the river’s current that causes the spinning motion.
According to Nakroshis, when temperatures dip during the winter, the river begins to freeze along the shores. Then, spurred on by the stronger current toward the middle of the river, ice chunks break off. “When you get two chunks of ice next to each other,” he says, “the water between them freezes.” In other words, small ice chunks fuse together to form large ice chunks — the same way ice cubes eventually freeze together while floating in your glass of water.
Wondering how the disk achieved its perfectly circular shape? Once there’s an exceptionally large chunk of ice in the river, the current pushes it into rotation. “When it runs into the shore, it shaves corners off and you get a nice circle,” Nakroshis says. “It’s not a mysterious process. These disks form in rivers all the time, all over the place where it’s cold enough.”However, he notes that what makes the Westbrook ice disk so unique is the sheer size of it: “This one’s particularly big.
Part of the appeal is the unpredictable nature of it. “This could be gone in a couple of days,” Ponti says. But while the giant ice disk remains on the river for now, she adds, “it kind of brings people together in a really fun way, which I fully support, now more than ever.”
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