Exploring the Paranormal - where the unusual is the normal

STRANGE CREATIONS


Forget crop circles ... a Canadian man has discovered what he has dubbed a "creek circle".

An amateur photographer from Mississauga, Brook Tyler discovered the round six-foot wide piece of ice in a frozen Sheridan Creek in the Rattray Marsh Conservation area.

And it was rotating, the excited 49-year-old man told the National Post.



“It was a perfectly round circle with about two inches of slush and water around the sides, and it was spinning,” he was quoted as saying.

“The ice was actually too thin on the creek to walk on and there was no footprints on the ice. The creek had just frozen.”

But, before we start looking to the skies for an answer, a river specialist and geography professor with the University of Toronto has 'poured cold water' on any theory it could have been created by alien forces.

Joe Desloges said the frozen circles are actually ice pans, or surface slabs of ice that form in the center of a lake or creek, instead of along the water’s edge.



He explained, as water cools, it releases heat that turns into frazil ice – a collection of loose, needle-shaped ice particles that can cluster together in an ice pan. If it accumulates enough frazil ice and the current is slow, over time, the pan can become a hanging dam – a dense, heavy piece of ice with high ridges and a low centre.

But, Mr Desloges does admit that the near-perfect circular shape of the Mississauga ice pan is very strange.

“Normally, you do not get edges of the ice pan so clean and even. It may occur when a pan forms quickly, then melts a bit before starting to refreeze,” he said. “There is the chance that these can form so perfectly, but not common at all.”