In December 2014, Slovenian weather photographer Marko Korošec went up Mount Javornik after a spell of high winds and freezing fog and found the summit turned to ice. Trees and a wooden lookout tower were encased in hard layers of rime, with spikes that, by his account, grew well over a metre long.
Marko Korošec on Mount Javornik
Korošec specialises in weather photography and shares his work through his WeatherPhotos.NET pages on Facebook and 500px. Mount Javornik is home to a popular ski centre, and its exposed summit catches the full force of winter storms. His pictures, published by the design blog This is Colossal on 19 December 2014, were shared widely online.
What makes them so striking is that everything familiar has been rebuilt by the weather. A ladder, a viewing platform and the branches of the trees are still there, but each is wrapped in thick white armour and bristling with pointed fins of ice, all aligned in the same direction.
How rime ice forms in freezing fog
The key ingredient is freezing fog: fog made of tiny water droplets that stay liquid even though the air is below 0°C. These supercooled droplets need something to freeze onto. When wind drives them against a surface that is already below freezing, such as a tree, a rock, a building or a power line, they freeze on contact.
Droplet after droplet adds to the deposit, and the ice grows in a feathery, fractal structure that builds outward into the wind. That is why rime on a mountaintop looks like flags or spikes pointing the same way: the shapes record the direction the weather came from. The longer the fog and wind last, the bigger the formations become, which explains the metre-long spikes on Javornik.
Hard rime, soft rime and glaze
Meteorologists separate a few related kinds of ice:
- Soft rime forms at colder temperatures. It is white, fragile and easy to knock off.
- Hard rime forms closer to the freezing point. It is denser, harder and more translucent, like the coating on Korošec’s lookout tower.
- Glaze forms the same way right at the freezing mark and is clear and very hard.
- Hoar frost is different: it grows when water vapour turns straight into ice crystals, without passing through the liquid stage.
Rime is beautiful but heavy. It can snap tree limbs, bring down power lines and break off as flying chunks when the wind picks up, so stay clear of iced towers and trees on a windy summit.
More winter in Slovenia
Slovenia packs Alpine peaks, karst plateaus and glacial lakes into a small country, and its winters can be spectacular. For another of Korošec’s rime series, see Rime on Mount Javornik: Marko Korošec’s Frozen Landscape. Gregor Skoberne’s Lake Bohinj photographs show a quieter side of the season, and our gallery of frozen lakes, oceans and ponds collects more patterns made by ice.
Related reading:
- Lake Bled, Slovenia: Island, Castle and Lakeside Views
- Rime on Mount Javornik: Marko Korošec’s Frozen Landscape
- Vintgar Gorge near Bled: The Radovna River, Walkways and Waterfalls
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