Find an Ice Flower Before It Melts

Trilobites

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The naturalist Mary Ronan, @bugsnthugs on Instagram, captured this ice flower in Pennsylvania in January.CreditMary Ronan

After unseasonably warm weather, some parts of the country are expected to be blasted by winter storms over the coming weeks. There may be a tiny, fleeting bright side for those who live in places where something known as frostweed grows: ice flowers.
It blossoms in the middle of the night, when the air is just at freezing and the ground is warm — at least relative to the air. As supercool water seeps out from the cracks of a plant stem, the surrounding air transforms the liquid to ice by a slow, steady process, as you can see in this time-lapse photography taken by Forrest M. Mims III, an amateur scientist and author, in the woods near his Texas home in January 2004.

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