Icy eggs

There was a striking picture - not the one left - of ice eggs on a Finnish beach in yesterday's Guardian. It turns out that the news, at least as reported by Bing, is full of them.

But what it was not full of was any proper explanation of this seemingly rare event, beyond a blogger saying that under certain weather conditions small bits of ice were rolled round by the wind and the water, growing into what you see left. Rather like, I suppose, the flints from the chalk cliffs that are rolled into round pebbles on our beaches. The catch being that pebbles get smaller as they roll around while these eggs must get bigger. Unless, that is, they actually start out as chunks of iceberg or chunks of ice sheet, liberated by global warming.