Be Excellent To Each Other

I saw these in my back garden the other week:

They're icicles but they're upside down. How does this occur?

You didn't pay the gravity bill.

You've....turned the table upside-down.

Did they form before whatever they formed on was turned upside down?

Obvious answer I know so it's probably wrong..

Well yes I have but that was at the end of last summer, these appeared overnight.

Are you in Australia?

Table cocks. It's mating season.

is there not anything overhanging that thingy.... ie they fell off something else?

Nope nothing like that.

Also you can see that they don't all point the same way as they would if they were just regular downward-pointing icicles.

Sorry, I'm not an icicologist.

My first thought was also that you turned the table upside down, but they look a bit.... 'funny' for that. Has some warmer water been able to drip very slowly onto the table?

They are icicle flowers and they are simply growing towards the sun, which ultimately leads to their demise.

If they froze quickly, could they force the ice through a hole into a sort of pillar, like when you live a milk bottle out and it freezes?

It must be something like I guess it's just not something I've ever seen or heard of before.

No definitely not, there's nothing directly above them but sky.

Hattifattener ghosts.

TABLE COCKS

Don't ignore my fact!

Wow, thats really interesting.

Off the top of my head....

idea 0. It was turned over.

idea 1. Plastic has molded injection points. Little round marks that you often notice on the underside of plastic items. They would be at roughly the same point in each segment and about the size of a coin (for large objects at least).

Those or another artifacts (even small flakes of dust, marks, durt) would be higher, and exposed enough to be much colder than the surrounding bits of the table.

The wet air, would condense on these points and freeze as ice quicker than the surrounding plastic. This ice would thus be thicker than any on the surrounding are and so leave it further exposed to more water vapour to condense onto the icicle.

Causing a runaway process where ice would condense onto the icicle increasing it's size.

It would require the air to be < 0 C so that when the water vapour reached the ice it would sublimate on.

I dunno, if thats right, but It's a decent hypothesis at least...

Ah that link does it. Have to say, wasn't too far off for last thing on a monday afternoon,

Shame it's Tuesday.

Hahahah!

Bugger.

Cheers Doc, I also just found this other link with more explanation and some pics of some that look just like mine:

http://www.newscientist.com/gallery/dn1 ... e-spikes/1

Those are great! Never seen them before. To get 4 of them like that must be pretty rare.