Ice Storm Bumper Shells: The Frozen Jeep Grille at Vidant Medical Center

After an ice storm in February 2015, visitors to the Vidant Medical Center car park in Greenville, North Carolina, found something odd in an empty parking space: the front end of a Jeep, grille and all, made entirely of ice. The car had driven away and left its frozen shell behind, propped up on icicles.

The “ghost Jeep” at Vidant Medical Center

The local TV station WITN shared the pictures. Kimberly Freeman photographed the front of the ice imprint in the hospital’s visitor car park one Tuesday afternoon, and another viewer who worked at Vidant sent in a second photo taken from the opposite side. Within days the “ghostly fender” was all over the internet, picked up by sites such as Bored Panda and Twisted Sifter.

How the ice shell formed around the car

The likely explanation came from WITN: the Jeep’s owner left the engine running to warm it up. Heat from the engine bay loosened the bond between the bumper and the coat of ice. When the driver backed out of the space, the ice stayed where it was, because it was frozen to the kerb and held up by the icicles that had grown down to the ground.

What makes the shell so detailed is the type of ice. Freezing rain falls as liquid and turns to ice only when it touches a surface, so it wraps around whatever it lands on and copies every curve. The result is called glaze: smooth, clear ice that can build up to several centimetres thick.

What causes freezing rain and ice storms

Freezing rain needs a particular layering of the atmosphere:

• Snow falls into a layer of warm air aloft and melts into rain.
• The rain then drops through a shallow layer of sub-freezing air near the ground.
• If that cold layer is shallow, the drops arrive as supercooled liquid and freeze on contact. If it is deep, they refreeze on the way down and land as sleet.

The setup often comes with an approaching warm front or cold-air damming, when cold air gets trapped against a mountain range. A storm that leaves heavy glaze is called an ice storm. Once ice passes about a quarter of an inch, tree limbs start to break, and ice-laden branches and power lines cause outages. The February 1994 ice storm in the southern United States caused more than $1 billion in damage.

Other cars left icy bumper shells too

The Jeep was not the only one. Similar shells appeared elsewhere after the same storm, such as this full-width bumper left standing on a pavement beside a row of bins.

The National Weather Service ice-storm information is a good guide to the practical side: even a thin coat makes roads treacherous, and bridges and overpasses freeze first. Give your car time to warm up and clear the windows fully before driving after freezing rain.

Winter takes a more deliberate artistic turn in Faust’s lettering on snowy cars. For another surprising vehicle story, revisit the bass-powered snow-removal clip.

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