Giant, naturally occurring snowballs washed up along a Russian beach in Siberia last week during an outbreak of unusually cold weather.
The snowballs are really thousands of balls of ice that formed and covered 11 miles of a remote Siberian coastline, The Washington Post reported. The balls went from tennis ball size up to nearly 3 feet in diameter.
Although residents of the villiage of Nyda on the Yamal Peninsula near the Arctic Circle said they have never seen anything like it before, the BBC reported, a similar phenomenon has taken place periodically along the shores of the Great Lakes during colder than normal weather patterns.
The snowballs form when slush and ice crystals collect in very cold water, then are rolled back and forth by waves until they become spherical in shape, according to Weather Underground. In calmer water, they often look like pancakes or Frisbees rather than snowballs.
Finland had the same phenomenon happen there in December 2014.
“It’s as if someone spilled them,” USA Today reported local resident Ekaterina Chernykh said. “They are all of different sizes, from tennis balls to volleyballs.” The weather in the area has been colder than usual this year, with Eurasian snow cover advancing in recent weeks.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.