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

(Image credit: Joel Blit/Getty Images)

published 6 November 2016

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."

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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.