J.T. REID’S GUN SHOP

These freaks of nature are found mostly in cold places like Scandinavia where they’re not at all common. Although most form in the twenty- to thirty-foot range, the Westbrook phenomenon has an impressive 300-foot diameter that turns at the speed of a brisk walk.

This monster may just be the biggest one ever. Residents of Aroostook County, a few years back, did chop a circle from pond ice that measured some 400-feet across and took four outboard motors to get moving. But that didn’t count, because it was man-made.

Something called the Coriolis effect (it concerns the earth’s rotation) makes the ice disk move in a counterclockwise direction, like all storms do north of the Equator. Intriguingly, south of that line all ice disks — and storms — move in an opposite clockwise way.

These spectacles are rare because they form under special conditions.

Temperature, water speed, the shape of the river, all play a role. But given the right freezing temperatures, a bend in the river where an eddy can form, some ice to solidify, and — presto! — you might have an ice disk that spins. Westbrook’s version is so huge that it’s been compared to a slushy crop circle, an icy carousel, or even a frozen Moon. Otherworldly, translucent, and altogether improbable, this wonderous beauty revolves in the river like a fine work of art.

Some debate exists over how they are formed. Do different water temperatures create a vortex that sets the ice spinning? (A circular chunk of ice plunked down in a warm tub of water will begin to whirl.) And how does the ice get so perfectly round? Eroded that way by a whirlpool? Or simply by scraping against the sides of the riverbank? Again, who knows? (And there’s no truth to the rumor at all that Wessie’s (cont. on page 6)

(cont. from page 5) under the ice and twirling it.)

So smoothly does it turn, in fact, that it is almost alien engineered.

Weather formed that disk; weather will take it away. Because it’s so ephemeral scientists have been scrambling to study it by webcam and drone before its inevitable demise. Until then, people continue to come and marvel at one of nature’s more fantastical quirks.

It makes you kind wonder what, exactly, is going on with Westbrook that keeps producing these oddball manifestations, doesn’t it?