Thousands of snowballs appeared out of nowhere on a beach in Siberia

(Image credit: Joel Blit/Getty Images)

Residents of the Russian village of Nyda, a rural town in Siberia north of the Arctic Circle, this week discovered thousands of natural snowballs covering an 11-mile stretch of beach. Though similar snowballs have been observed in Michigan and Finland, this is the first known time they've appeared in Nyda.

The snowballs vary in size from smaller than a baseball to bigger than a bowling ball. "As a rule, first there is a primary natural phenomenon — sludge ice, slob ice," said Sergei Lisenkov of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute. "Then comes a combination of the effects of the wind, the lay of the coastline, and the temperature and wind conditions. It can be such an original combination that it results in the formation of balls like these."

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.