Puddles
The seeds for puddle ice were pebbles, rocks, and leaves along the edge and in the middle of the puddle and likely dust. These puddles of ice formed the same way as the ruts, with an original sheet sagging to make stress contours. The large puddles were photographed in November 2014. The Driveway puddles during early March 2021.
A dried erratically formed puddle, which lost its water to the ice sheet that covered it. The contoured rings are stress fractures caused by the weight of the ice as it lost its water support. Total length was about two meters.
Detail of a Puddle among Rocks and Showing Stars: A close look will find star formations and other spicules frozen into the sheet. The rings are stress fractures. The circles may be related to joints between fractures.
Detail of a Rectangular Puddle Showing a Ring of Holes: This is a detail of a full puddle image shown elsewhere here. The holes were filled with clear ice which had air bubbles. Why they formed is unclear but are surely related to stress because they are concentric with the rings.
Driveway Puddle A: The Driveway images show ice formed on a small shallow puddle on my old rough driveway. There are interesting dendritic formations, and what appear to be curled fractures that may be stress contours around rough sections or small pebbles. These driveway images are of areas about 30 cm wide.
Sunlit Fractures Within Black Ice Upon Pebbles: The area was 7 cm wide in the horizontal direction. The fractures were caused by sagging when the water beneath detached from the ice. They are curvilinear because of the ice's attachment to pebbles and places on the ground along the ice edges.
Driveway Puddle C: More detail of the fine ring fractures. They appear to have some width but that might really be light reflecting from within the fracture, as commonly seen on big lake fractures when ice is clear. The image is of an area about 15 cm wide.
Puddle among Rocks: This ice sheet was suspended amongst rocks and anchored along some edges to ground. There is a line of apparent circular fractures (maybe) shown in detail elsewhere here. Sheet about two meters long.
Rectangular Puddle: This puddle, about two meters wide, had to have been anchored along the edge, and to the visible few rocks including the one in the middle (see detail elsewhere here). The white color was caused by either recrystallization or microcracking.
Thin ice puddle showing healed fracture contours. The next image shows the growth of hoar under the prominent contours.
The underside of a puddle showing the accumulation of tiny hoar crystals, especially under the fracture contours. Hoar grows from vapor, showing that water beneath the puddle was receding, while evaporating to the colder ice skim above.
Edge view of hoar growth beneath a puddle-ice skim. Millimeter scale is on left side of ruler.