Found: Rare, Bizarre ‘Dragon-Skin Ice’

In the west Antarctica, in a place where there’s a patch of open water ringed by sea ice, scientists on a U.S. icebreaker observed, for the first time in a decade, a “very rare, bizarre” formation known as “dragon-skin ice.”

The wind in this place is strong—hurricane-strength, even—and can lift up ice that’s formed on the surface, exposing the water beneath, as Science Alert reports. That exposed water freezes into ice, too, create a scaly ice surface that looks a little bit like butter smeared in flour, a pie-crust in the making.

This phenomenon, though, is “evidence of a darker chaos in the cyrospheric realm,” says Guy Williams, a polar oceanographer at the University of Tasmania. The cryosphere is the Earth’s frozen reaches—the spot where Willaims and other researchers encountered the ice is the rare place where frozen water and incredibly strong winds meet, “an epic demonstration of polar ocean-atmospheric interaction,” Williams says.