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Frost flowers

They are very beautiful, are not they?
The picture can't tell you the truth of this beautiful sight!

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Frost flowers are ice crystals commonly found growing on young sea ice and thin lake ice in cold, calm conditions. The ice crystals are similar to hoar frost, and are commonly seen to grow in patches around 3–4 cm in diameter. Frost flowers growing on sea ice have extremely high salinities and concentrations of other sea water chemicals and, because of their high surface area, are efficient releasers of these chemicals into the atmosphere.
A different phenomenon, in which ice is extruded from freezing plants, is also referred to as frost flowers.
Frost flowers roughen the surface and dramatically alter its electromagnetic signal...
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"...They are the issue of acrid winter, these first- flower young women;
their scent is lacerating and repellant,
it smells of burning snow, of hot-ache,
of earth, winter-pressed, strangled in corruption;
it is the scent of the fiery-cold dregs of corruption,
when destruction soaks through the mortified, decomposing earth,
and the last fires of dissolution burn in the bosom of the ground.

They are the flowers of ice-vivid mortification,
thaw-cold, ice-corrupt blossoms,
with a loveliness I loathe;
for what kind of ice-rotten, hot-aching heart must they need to root in!"

A poem by David Herbert Lawrence

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