pipkrake

English

Ice needles (pipkrake) pushing soil particles upwards in Shiga Kōgen, Japan.

Etymology

From Swedish pipkrake, from pip (“tube”) +‎ krake (“thin, fine, weak”), coined by Swedish botanist Henrik Hesselman in 1907.

Noun

pipkrake (countable and uncountable, plural pipkrakes)

1. Needle ice; ice structures formed when the air temperature is below 0℃ and the soil is not.
   • 1979, E. Derbyshire, Geomorphological Processes, Routledge, →ISBN, page 208:

     The most widespread and familiar example of this process is that associated with the growth of needle ice or pipkrake (Figure 5.15), needles of clear ice commonly exceeding 5 cm in length. Growth of pipkrake is favoured by supercooling of the soil in conditions of marked radiative heat loss from the surface […]

Further reading

• needle ice on Wikipedia.Wikipedia