In the first year tutorial sessions that I run on our Ocean Exploration and Ocean Science courses we give all of our students an opportunity to give a short informal presentation to their group on a topical piece of marine science news (though sometimes the topics, being selected by the students, have relatively little to do with marine science). The idea is that these presentations are a prelude to an assessed presentation that the students give later in the term and a chance to get a bit of practice and confidence-building. Most of these presentations cover topics that I am familiar with but occasionally they throw up something completely new to me… A couple of weeks ago we ran this year’s sessions and one of the students spoke about “ice circles”. These are, what appear to be, perfect circles of ice that form in rivers and rotate slowly as the river flows around and underneath them. One such ice circle, 10 feet wide and potentially the first to be observed in a British river, had recently formed in the River Otter in Devon and the news story had been picked up by this student’s home local newspaper (and reported subsequently in various places including here in The Times newspaper). Apparently ice circles are much more common in Scandinavia and there is some debate about how they form with one suggestion being that they are the result of alien activities… whatever the truth (and personally I don’t go for the alien stories) it’s well worth having a bit of a google for “ice circles” to look at some of the spectacular images that are out there on the web.
Tim O'Hare 