Take a walk in the mountains and document a rare and mesmerizing natural phenomenon: a huge rotating ice disc - voila! tourism

A rare natural phenomenon: a huge ice disk appeared in a river in Maine (Westbrook, Maine Ice Disk – Presumpscot River from City of Westbrook, Maine on Vimeo.)

A hiker stood mesmerized in front of a huge, perfectly round frozen disc he found spinning in the water while hiking in a mountainous area in Scotland.

"To come across something so peaceful and perfectly formed, it feels surreal," 32-year-old Dan Brown told the South West News Service of the wondrous spectacle.

"We took mountain bikes with us for a trip," recalls the Dunon resident, who stumbled upon this anomaly while hiking with his father up the mountain between Boheida near Loch Chan Shira in western Scotland.

"The visibility wasn't great, but after about an hour and a half, the snow stopped and the clouds started to clear."

At that moment, Brown "noticed the disk of ice slowly rotating at the foot of a small waterfall.

"None of us had ever seen anything like it - a perfect circle of ice slowly rotating in the water," said Brown, who obviously took photos and videos of the surreal natural phenomenon, the New York Post reported.

This is how it looks

In his footage, the ice disc can be seen spinning slowly on top of the swirling water and the New York Post claimed it looked like a giant frozen turntable or a tombstone placed there eons ago by (say) some ancient alien race.

Brown said the discovery was even more special because he and his father "didn't run into anyone else on the trip and we felt like we were the only people for miles around."

At first he thought what he was seeing was created by the current at the bottom of the waterfall, but he later learned it was a rare natural phenomenon called an ice disc.

Explanations for what causes it vary, but a 2016 study suggested that "underwater currents likely help such discs form initially, but it's temperature changes that cause them to spin," according to National Geographic.

We have already encountered this

A rare natural phenomenon: a huge disc of ice appeared in a river in Maine and the locals were hysterical

To the full article

"Warm water is less dense than colder water, so when the ice melts and sinks, it creates a vortex under the disk that causes it to spin," the researchers wrote.

"The hotter the water, the faster the disk spins," they found.

More records of the phenomenon.

How was a spectacular revolving ice carousel created in the middle of a frozen lake?

A mysterious rotating ice circle in the heart of a river will leave you mesmerized by the screen

Giant ice disk gif in Maine (Photo: official website, Westbrook, Maine Ice Disk – Presumpscot River from City of Westbrook, Maine on Vimeo.)

The natural phenomenon may be rare but has already been observed in the past.

Ice circles rotating on their axis occasionally form in frozen rivers, mainly in the Arctic, Scandinavia and Canada, when temperatures drop below zero.

Many people make the mistake of thinking that the rotation of the disc is caused by the flow of water in a river or an eddy, but it is actually caused by the process of melting ice.

At a low temperature, a thin layer of ice forms on the surface of the water and when the ice rotates on its axis, it wears away the frozen areas around it and produces a sort of polished circle.

• tourism

Tags

• ice

• disk