# @stem_antics on Instagram

- **Type:** Video
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/DZ0EZ2iA6FY
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/66891672-stem-antics-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/postThumbnails/3f1b45f2d0.jpg
- **Posted:** 2026-06-20T16:02:08.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Stem Antics (@stem_antics) — https://gondola.cc/stem_antics

## Caption

Walk onto a thawing lake in spring and the surface can shatter into thousands of vertical glass needles, each one pointing straight down into the dark water below. They clink like wind chimes. They will also cut through boot leather. This is candle ice: ice caught in the act of falling apart along the lines it was built on.

The story starts months earlier. When a calm lake loses heat to freezing air, the first clear sheet to form is congelation ice, grown not by snow piling on top but by water freezing onto the underside of the existing cover. Heat conducts up through the ice and escapes, so new crystal grows downward into the colder-than-it-looks water beneath.

That downward growth is selective. Ice is hexagonal, and crystals whose lattice favors vertical extension outrun their neighbors in a slow competition called geometric selection. The losers get pinched off. What survives is a forest of long columnar grains, all standing on end, perpendicular to the surface, tips probing toward the lakebed.

Freezing also purifies. As water locks into the lattice it rejects dissolved salts and minerals, shoving them sideways into the seams between columns. The sheet becomes a bundle of clean crystals glued together by concentrated impurity.

Spring flips the script. Sunlight and meltwater attack those impure boundaries first, because trapped solutes depress the local melting point and the dirty seams soak up more radiation. The glue fails before the columns do. A sheet that still looks solid silently disaggregates into a raft of loose vertical candles held together by almost nothing, sharp enough that early Arctic travelers called it penknife ice. The same boundary logic that builds columnar basalt at Giant's Causeway tears this apart, just running in reverse.

Structure remembers how it was built. Ice just writes it down in needles.

#stemantics #candleice #cryosphere #materialsscience #physics

## Stats

- **Views:** 52,293
- **Likes:** 4,983
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- **Comments:** 35

## Tags

candleice, materialsscience, cryosphere, physics, stemantics

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