So we ended up getting 13 or 14 inches of snow yesterday. It was wet, and the temperature was right around freezing. As soon as it stopped falling, it started melting.
One interesting aspect of this is that big wads of slushy snow were plopping off the trees every time a gust of wind came through.
The structures these “plops” formed exhibit much of the same morphology of meteorite impact craters on Earth and the Moon. Here are two examples from my deck:
Note the radial arms and the central peak.
It’s 38°F out there now, so I’m going to get out and take a GigaPan while there’s still some snow left to photograph.
The mechanics of a semi-lithified bolide would make an unusual study – I don’t know if that has ever happened, or if it has, if it has been studied. I wouldn’t call the central clump an uplift because the uplift is not made of deck wood, but rather of snow. Fine point to be made here, but my focus is on being accurate here. The ejecta rays are what impress me. They appear to have earlier come close to contacting the central snow glob (nice scientific term). All this is just the reverse of what I studied for my master’s thesis . . . which was the rheology of a solid bolide impacting possibly semi-lithified sediments. Only you and I would smile seeing “stuff like this” and KEEP smiling as we take pictures – knowing other people would understand.