Ghost apples require the alignment of several complicated parameters, so they can only appear in places.
Ghost apples, which appear ethereal and transparent like crystals, are not anything humans can create via manipulating nature; this occurrence is absolutely natural, and we may even call it magical. A farmer in Michigan uncovered them following a spell of freezing rain.
THIS IS HOW PHANTOM APPLES COME INTO BEING.
When it rains, the water has no choice but to freeze, accumulating in extremely thin layers. The water covers the apple as it freezes, which accounts for the figure’s shape, but why isn’t there an apple frozen inside the ice? In an essay for Today, Susan Brown, a professor of agriculture at Cornell University, explains the procedure.
Since the appearance of ghost apples depends on the confluence of several variables, this phenomenon can’t occur by chance. Because the ice that covers them is so thin and melts quickly, the apples are the essential aspect. “The peel keeps them like a full water balloon,” adds Brown.
Since the phenomena rely on the apples’ pulp, it’s ideal to use apples that have remained on the trees long beyond harvest season and have decomposed to the point where they take on the consistency of a puree or mush.
Apples have a very low freezing point than water, so when they freeze, the apple peel dissolves and the liquid mush within drains out of the ice mold. When the apple hits the ground in this way, the translucent ice layer retains its apple-like shape.
For the ice to reach all the fruit, it takes freezing rain and persistently low temperatures, and then the decaying apple mush is leached out at the bottom of the frozen layer, leaving a detailed, hollow imprint of an apple.
Andrew Sietsema was blessed to have been tending his orchard in Sparta, Michigan, when he witnessed this miraculous natural event. The ice was nearly half an inch thick, and the apples resembled “Christmas tree bulbs,” as Sietsema said to Today Food.
Images by Andrew Sietsema.
H/T: culturacolectiva.com
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