Some of us gripe about winter nonstop—freezing temps, slick roads, and endless hours cooped up indoors. Sure, summer steals the spotlight, and winter can be hazardous. Yet, the season also gifts us with oddly beautiful spectacles that feel straight out of a fantasy novel.
10 Weird Whimsical Winter Phenomena Overview
10 Light Pillars
Imagine pastel-hued columns of light hovering eerily just above the ground, looking like alien beacons on a frosty night. When they appear, onlookers often swear they’re witnessing something otherworldly, yet the cause is surprisingly ordinary.
“Like all halos, they are purely the collected light beams from all the millions of [ice] crystals, which just happen to be reflecting light toward your eyes or camera,” explains Les Cowley, a retired physicist and atmospheric‑optics specialist.
On exceptionally cold, still evenings, flat ice crystals high in the atmosphere drift down close to the surface, acting like countless tiny mirrors that bounce city streetlights and vehicle headlights back toward observers. This reflection creates the uncanny, hovering pillars that often mimic the hue of the lights they echo.
Interestingly, the same effect can arise when the sun or moon shines on those crystals, giving rise to sun pillars or moon pillars that bathe the night in a ghostly glow.
9 Penitentes
These uncanny snow spikes look like a field of icy daggers, some soaring higher than a person’s shoulders—up to six metres (about twenty feet) tall! Spotting a lone cluster of these spindly towers, without any surrounding snow, can feel like stepping onto an alien battlefield.
Penitentes develop in lofty regions above 4,000 metres (13,000 ft) where hardened snow or ice endures in shallow valleys that retain deep snowpacks while the sun’s rays remain relatively gentle.
The process hinges on sublimation—snow turning straight into vapor without melting. Some patches evaporate faster than others, carving deeper hollows. Over time, these depressions evolve into towering, razor‑sharp spikes. Though they appear delicate, they pose serious challenges for mountaineers navigating the terrain.
8 Ice Balls
Back in 2016, a remote Siberian village awoke to a surreal sight: a coastline strewn with countless spheres of ice, as if the ocean had disgorged a treasure chest of frozen marbles.
The icy debris stretched for roughly 18 kilometres (11 miles) along the Gulf of Ob, with individual balls ranging from a tennis‑ball size up to a full metre (three feet) in diameter. Even the village elders were baffled by this unexpected snow‑ball‑fight‑ready landscape.
These formations, also dubbed ice boulders, arise from frazil ice—a slushy cocktail of crystal fragments and water. Turbulent seas and fierce winds tumble the ice, sculpting it into near‑perfect spheres that can acquire a tan sheen from sand particles.
When the water calms, the same process yields flatter, pancake‑like disks. Weighing up to 23 kilograms (50 pounds), these hefty globes are far from the lighthearted snowball fights we imagine.
7 Ice Volcanoes
We all know volcanoes as fiery mountains that spew molten lava and noxious gases. Yet, a cooler cousin exists that erupts not molten rock but frozen gases.
Ice volcanoes—also called cryovolcanoes—behave much like their hot‑blooded relatives: pressure builds beneath the surface, eventually bursting outward in either violent blasts or gentle flows. The key difference is that the expelled material consists of frozen water, ammonia, or methane rather than lava.
The discovery of cryovolcanoes on Pluto in 2016 sparked excitement, though they were first documented on Triton, Neptune’s largest moon, back in 1989.
These alien eruptions can be colossal. Pluto’s Wright Mons, for example, towers four kilometres (2.5 miles) high and stretches a staggering 145 kilometres (90 miles) across, dwarfing Earth’s most massive volcanoes.
6 Thundersnow
An awe‑inducing word that is exactly what it sounds like, thundersnow is a phenomenon that occurs when thunder and lightning happen during a snowstorm. The conditions have to be just right for this to occur. The weather must still be cold enough to make snow, but the layer of air near the ground must be warmer than the air above it.
Like a thunderstorm, warm and moist air wafts upward to create unstable air columns, which then condense into clouds. When regular snowstorm clouds develop bumps called turrets, it signifies unstable air currents that lead to precipitation such as hail and snow.
As these particles collide into each other, electrical charges build up and are released in the form of lightning. Unfortunately, even if you are in the right place for this rare weather event to occur, the most you will be able to see is a flash of brightness followed by the rumble of thunder.
5 Pancake Ice
Strange, frozen lily pads dot the river, covering the water with circles that are up to 3 meters (10 ft) across. These circular slabs resemble peculiar Frisbees or pizzas, yet they are made up of ice that can be up to 10 centimeters (4 in) thick.
When slush accumulates on a calm water’s surface in below‑freezing temperatures, the slabs of ice are bumped or splashed into each other to create the circular shapes with the raised edges around them. In a more turbulent ocean, the slabs of pancake ice are pushed over each other, eventually freezing into a solid sheet of ice.
These formations are beautiful yet eerie to behold. While most commonly found in Antarctica, they can appear anywhere if the conditions are right.
4 Hoarfrost
The Old English dictionary definition of “hoarfrost” is “expressing the resemblance of white feathers of frost to an old man’s beard.” The feathery substance can be seen covering trees, leaves, and bushes with a fine layer of ice crystals on a frosty day, giving the appearance of a winter wonderland.
Hoarfrost is created in a similar way to dew. When water vapor molecules come in contact with a grass blade or other object in below‑freezing temperatures, deposition occurs. Deposition (when the gas state leads directly to the solid state) results in the covering of feathery ice crystals. The more moisture in the air, the thicker the coating as the frost forms bigger and more complex patterns.
3 Frogsicles
As the days grow shorter and temperatures plummet to below freezing, a variety of animals have adaptations that help them survive the oncoming winter. While bears sleep and geese fly south, the wood frog has a disturbing, uncanny strategy: It simply allows itself to freeze solid.
Unlike most frogs, which insulate themselves in the mud beneath lakes, wood frogs burrow into land. The leaf litter provides little warmth, and the frogs’ bodies soon shut down entirely. The heart ceases to beat, the organs stop functioning, and the blood freezes.
In other organisms, freezing damages tissues by rupturing the cells’ delicate structures with ice crystals. The cells become dehydrated and are no longer able to function. The wood frog avoids this life‑threatening dilemma by producing large amounts of glucose and transporting it into its cells to effectively act as antifreeze.
Urea levels also rise, which adds more protection. While the cells themselves are not frozen, the water does freeze in the skin, eyes, and muscles and the abdominal cavity surrounding certain organs, making the frog as solid as a block.
When spring comes, the animal thaws from the inside out. The heart and lungs begin to function again, and the frog hops away as though nothing has happened.
2 Skypunch
It looks as though a giant hand has reached down and torn a patch of the clouds away, leaving a gaping wound in the middle of the sky. Is it an act of God? Aliens? Or a bizarre cloud formation?
Skypunches (aka fallstreak holes) occur when the weather conditions align perfectly. The water droplets in clouds must be at a temperature below zero but not cold enough to make snow. The cloud droplets do not freeze normally. Instead, they stay in position as supercooled water droplets.
Eventually, some of them turn into ice and start a chain reaction of the rest of the vapor freezing as well. The vapor that does not turn into ice evaporates, resulting in a hole in the cloud.
Research has confirmed that passing aircraft are responsible for starting the freezing process. When airplanes fly through the cloud, the air cools as it passes through the plane’s wings and propellers. The cooling is enough for the droplets to freeze.
Although skypunches appear to be the majestic work of a giant reaching through the clouds, it is merely the work of humans after all.
1 Icicles Of Death
Forget about icicles. Brinicles form on the ocean floor and are just as deadly as they are fascinating. Sea ice forms in the frosty conditions of the Arctic and Antarctica. Salt leaks out of the ice, which increases the salinity of water and lowers its freezing point.
Density also increases. The salty brine is prevented from turning into ice and sinks into the much warmer areas further down in the ocean, causing the surrounding water to freeze and form a brinicle. When the giant blue tentacle twists downward to touch the seafloor, a patch of ice instantly blooms and freezes (i.e., kills) everything it touches.
“They look like upside‑down cacti that are blown from glass, like something from Dr. Seuss’s imagination. They’re incredibly delicate and can break with only the slightest touch,” says Andrew Thurber, a professor at Oregon State University.
And yet, the deadly pillars can yield the secrets to life as well. Bruno Escribano, a researcher at the Basque Center for Applied Mathematics, explains, “[Inside the sea ice], you have a high concentration of chemical compounds, and you also have lipids, fats, that coat the inside of the compartment. These can act as a primitive membrane—one of the conditions necessary for life.”
These components may also contain the ingredients needed to make DNA.