When the snow was melting back in early April, I noticed that the remains of my backyard skating rink were showing a very strange form of ice. The supposedly packed ice was disintegrating into a bundle of straw-like columns but hexagonal in shape, some longer than 100 millimetre, and up to 5 millimetre in "diameter".
In an earlier @discovery.ca program, a defence scientist from Valcartier (Québec) explained why snowflake crystals are in hexagonal shape. The same reason, i.e., the 120-degree angle of the 2 hydrogen atoms around the oxygen atom in a water molecule, would explain the hexagonal form of the ice columns. However, I don't see the hexagonal columns in ice cubes in my freezer. I suspect that certain condition of ambient temperature makes this bizzar phenomenon, but I would like to know the exact reason of the strange formation.
Has this kind of phenomenon been known or published before? If not, I would like my discovery to be known as "Sunatori's Hexagonal Ice Filament".
