Hiker captures hypnotic video of spinning ice disk: ‘It felt surreal’

It was a glazy Susan.

An adventurer was mesmerized after encountering a giant, perfectly round frozen disc spinning in water while hiking a mountainous area in Scotland.

“To happen across something so serene and perfectly formed, it felt surreal,” Dan Brown, 32, told South West News Service of the Lazy Susan-esque spectacle that is marveling viewers online.

“We’d taken mountain bikes with us and, for the best part, had been carrying them up a hydro track,” recalled the Dunoon resident, who happened upon the alpine anomaly on Jan. 2 while hiking with his father up the mountain of Beinn Bhuidhe, near Lochan Shira. “Visibility wasn’t great but after about an hour-and-a-half, the snow stopped and cloud cover started to clear.”

That’s when Brown “noticed the ice disk slowly spinning at the foot of a small waterfall” as they approached a glen, he said.

“Neither of us had ever seen anything like it — a perfect circle of ice slowly rotating in the water,” added the Scot, who snapped pictures and recorded videos of the surreal event.

His footage shows the ice disc rotating slowly atop the eddy like a frozen turntable or an anomaly placed there eons ago by, say, some ancient alien race. Brown said the sight was particularly special as he and his father hadn’t “encountered anyone else on the hike” and “felt like we were the only people for miles around.”

Initially thinking it was formed by the current at the bottom of the waterfall, Brown learned later that it was a rare phenomenon called an ice disk. Explanations of the event vary; however, a 2016 study suggested that “currents likely help such disks form initially but temperature changes are what keep them spinning,” according to National Geographic.

“Warm water is less dense than cooler water, so as ice melts and sinks, it creates a vortex under the disk that causes it to rotate,” they wrote. “The warmer the water, the faster the disk spins, they found.”

Scientists compared the event to placing an ice sphere in water, resulting in the same vortex effect will occur as the ice melts.