NEW SCIENTIST: Strange ice lolly icicles seen floating in clouds above the UK

Description

A cloud full of ice lollies sounds like something out of a fairy tale. But this phenomenon has been spotted in cloud systems over the UK and North Atlantic.

A significant concentration of these curious ice formations – in the shape of a stick with a spherical head at the end – were seen on a research flight over the north-east Atlantic Ocean last September, after previously being observed over the south-west UK in January 2009. Stavros Keppas and his colleagues at the University of Manchester have now published their findings from both flights.