corvi

We have received our once-a-year pile of snow, which means I will soon be making my once-a-year post containing a pile of snow photos.

This year, the snow is doing something I haven't seen before: as it melts, raised shapes that look kind of like frosting roses on a cake appear. They're only in the forest, not on open ground, so I think they probably have something to do with snow falling off trees and getting compressed, then melting more slowly than the regular ground snow, but it's cool and weird.

There are literally hundreds of them. Has anyone seen these before? What are they called? How do they form?

Hmmmm.

Option 1
They form when snow gets a little slushy and falls off trees. Multiple clumps fall out of the tree, first larger ones, then smaller ones. Each clump flattens into a disc when it hits the snow already on the ground. Subsequent smaller clumps falling from the same branch land on top of previous discs and make a set of concentric layers.

Problem: I think these appeared the day after all the snow fell off the trees.

Option 2
They form when a stalactite of partially-melted snow, cone shaped, falls from a tree and imbeds itself in the fluffier snow on the ground. When, the next day, the ground snow melts, remnants of the cone collapse into a set of raised concentric arcs.

Problem: I don't know if there's any reason to assume the snow chunks falling off the trees fall in cone shapes.

Option 3
They're caused by melted, liquid water dripping from trees, and slushing up the snow on the ground with splashes.

Problem: I would expect them to last less long than the rest of the snow, if they're made by liquid. But they're outlasting the rest of the snow and it looks like we could end this years Snow Dump by just having little rose shapes scattered around the ground, long after everything else has melted.

Baffled and delighted by the snow roses.