A north-east family discovered something very cool on their car windscreen: snow that had gathered itself up like a Swiss roll.
Gayl Trubby came across the bizarre phenomenon when she went outside to check her car at lunchtime on Sunday.
Like much of the north-east, her family’s home in Torphins had been covered with a beautiful blanket of snow – not an unfamiliar sight, unlike the shape on her windshield.
She said: “We’d never seen anything like it before.
“I shared it on my Facebook and a friend said she seen on a parked car in Ballater last week.”
The odd formation happens when a relatively thin layer of snow begins to grown on top of a separate layer which it cannot stick to, such as ice or powder snow.
Either gravity or a gust of wind will cause the top of the slope to start folding over itself, at just the right angle so it does not break.
The delicate nature of the process makes the phenomenon very rare – even if it was spotted in both Ballater and Torphins within a week.
Unfortunately, Ms Trubby had to remove the roll soon after finding it in order to use her car, but son Thomas had a bit of fun playing around with the solid log of snow.
North-east family wakes up to rare ‘arctic roll’ snow formation on windscreen