Strange Fluffy Snow Cylinders

In his novella At the Mountains of Madness, which is set in Antarctica, H. P. Lovecraft's narrator at one point writes:

The newspapers have printed the bulletins we sent from the moving plane, telling of our nonstop course, our two battles with treacherous upper-air gales, our glimpse of the broken surface where Lake had sunk his mid-journey shaft three days before, and our sight of a group of those strange fluffy snow cylinders noted by Amundsen and Byrd as rolling in the wind across the endless leagues of frozen plateau.

This reference to rolling snow cylinders intrigued me, and I imagine that in Lovecraft's research for the story he did turn up references to them in reports by polar explorers Amundsen and Byrd, but Googling the phenomenon did not turn up any hits–at least back when I did the search, with the search terms I had.

So I was very interested to see a story about the phenomenon in The Telegraph reporting that it also occurs in the U.K.–and in North America for that matter.

The article came complete with pictures, so . . . behold!

Snow_cylinders
Snow_cylinder2
I just hope that the appearance of these snow cylinders in the U.K. and North America don't indicate a parallel appearance of shoggoths.

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Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

10 thoughts on “Strange Fluffy Snow Cylinders”

  1. Cool! I love it when Lovecraft’s stories break into “real” life. That story is one of my favorites. I bought a large map of Antarctica to study (pre-internet) which still hangs on my attic wall. I now ponder it while I listen to my Erich Zann CDs.

  2. These remind me of pieces of fluted columns from ancient architecture. I wonder if these were the inspiration for the Greek and Roman builders.

  3. whoa…I try to balance 2 of my biggest interests, Catholicism and the horror genre. Sometimes this is difficult. Seeing the name HP Lovecraft on a blog by Jimmy Akin just made it all the more so. This is not a complaint, just a statement.

  4. If you had an aerial view and connected the dots (cylinders), you would see the diagram of what in the summer would turn out to be a crop circle.

  5. I love it when Lovecraft’s stories break into “real” life.
    You may be the only person in the world to have ever written those words. 🙂

  6. I felt inspired:
    When ancient gods tentacular
    From darkened pools ooze,
    Destruction most spectacular
    Doomed mankind dost peruse.
    Then dread undead Cthulhu
    Will your relatives consume.
    Dagon’s children rule you
    And herd you toward your tomb.
    Fear freezes shut your ventricles;
    Thought freezes in your brain.
    Wrapped in icy tentacles,
    All hope is proven vain.
    All light is now extinguished,
    Subsumed in endless dark.
    All human works distinguished
    Fade with the fading spark.
    No promised flowers vernal,
    No love, no joy, no dreams;
    Only blackness, night eternal,
    Pierced by eternal screams.

  7. Dr. Mike: That’s classic, thanks for sharing it. It doesn’t have much to do with the thread topic, so it may get removed (here where the world is quiet), but I’ve already saved my copy.

  8. Here I live in snow country and it took a SoCal blog for me to learn something new about snow. God does indeed work in strange ways.

  9. I’d be interested to see, Jimmy, if anyone has a picture of the beginning of a track made by one of these cylinders. I wonder why they form in such numbers.

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