In Case You Missed It: Ice balls bobbing in Lake Michigan

Um, some alien eggs have suddenly appeared on Lake Michigan and what’s next seems inevitable (an earth takeover?).

What? Those are ice balls? Who knew?

This bitter cold storm in the midwest is making some strange things happen. You have the polar bear who wouldn’t go outside at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago, the escaped Kentucky inmate who turned himself in to get warm and now we’ve got thousands of spherical objects filling up Lake Michigan.

While they may look like dirty bowling balls, these ice balls are actually smoothed-out ice chunks.

Annie Lipscomb, a Park Ranger at the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, explained to MLive.com that these chunks break off of large ice sheets on the lake and take on their spherical shape as they get tossed and thrashed by the waves.

“It’s possible that the ice is accreting like a snowball or like a hailstone, and that they keep growing,” AccuWeather.com Meteorologist Jim Andrews said.

Some of these babies weigh as much as 50 pounds. That’s an abominable snowball.

Apparently this isn’t super rare, but odd enough to make you wonder if the world’s end is near.

Have an interesting video you’d like to share? Contact Graydon Johns at gjohns@reviewjournal.com. Find him on Twitter: @gjohns.