An 11-mile stretch of Russian beaches were invaded by a strange and wonderful sight, thousands of naturally formed snowballs.
Locals in the Gulf of Ob, in northwest Siberia, awoke to a huge collection of snowballs, numbering in the thousands with some measuring 3ft across.
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The sculptural shapes range from the size of a tennis ball to almost 1m (3ft) across.
They result from a rare environmental process where small pieces of ice form, are rolled by wind and water, and end up as giant snowballs. Locals in the village of Nyda, which lies on the Yamal Peninsula just above the Arctic Circle, say they have never seen anything to compare to them. Russian TV quoted an explanation from Sergei Lisenkov, press secretary of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute: “As a rule, first there is a primary natural phenomenon – sludge ice, slob ice. Then comes a combination of the effects of the wind, the lay of the coastline, and the temperature and wind conditions. “It can be such an original combination that it results in the formation of balls like these.” h/t bbc
A similar phenomenon was witnessed in the Gulf of Finland in December 2014, and on Lake Michigan in December 2015.