This is pretty friggin cool

sixpenceee:

While they look like frozen waves, they are not. These formations are created in Antarctica over time. Most of these images result from melting, not from freezing. Melting has produced the downward pointing spikes that look like a breaking wave but they are simply icicles.

The beautiful smoothly polished surfaces are again the result of melting; freshly frozen ice, especially ice that has frozen rapidly, is cloudy and opaque. The transparent ice in the photographs has been created in a glacier or ice cap by the slow annealing of ice as it is buried under each year’s successive accumulation of snow. (Source)