A picture of an unusual-looking ice formation in the Northumberland Strait is captivating social media users – and for good reason.
P.E.I. pilot Paul Tymstra took the above photo of a rare pattern of ice rectangles while flying over the Confederation Bridge, which links Prince Edward Island with mainland Canada. Ever since Tymstra posted the photo on Twitter, people around the Internet have been guessing what the unusual phenomenon may have been caused by.
According to Trevor Hodgson, an ice breaking superintendent with the Canadian Coast Guard in the Atlantic region, for the ice to form this particular way specific conditions have to be present. When the water in the strait freezes in winter, the wind and tides can push the floating ice against the bridge, making its evenly spaced piers slice it up into remarkably uniform rectangular chunks.
To give you an idea of how big the rectangles are, the bridge piers designed to break up the ice sheets are 820 feet (250 meters apart). So that’s actually how wide each rectangle is!
And that’s just their width! The length of the blocks varies but, on average, it is about 75 per cent greater than their width.
Having won dozens of international engineering awards since its construction, Confederation Bridge was specifically designed to withstand this kind of pressure from the ice.
A recent satellite image shows the bridge’s ice slicing in action:
The sheer magnitude of nature’s forces is breathtaking.
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