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Capital Weather Gang

Photo: Rime ice freezes daddy longlegs in its tracks

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December 13, 2018 at 12:05 p.m. EST

The itsy bitsy spider had a rough go of it Tuesday morning, ending up in a web of trouble. This daddy longlegs fell victim to rime ice, a byproduct of freezing fog that descended on south-central Tennessee around the start of the commute.

Jessica George snapped this picture in Kelso, a town of roughly 1,300 located about 80 miles south of Nashville. The spider was frozen in its tracks, solidified by a coat of rime ice.

“There was a region southeast of Nashville with thick freezing fog,” Jared Plushnick said. He’s the morning meteorologist at WKRN-TV, ABC’s Nashville affiliate. There was "lots of rime ice on trees, but when I saw this photo, I was blown away.”

The National Weather Service in Nashville issued a freezing fog advisory early Tuesday morning, warning residents in Middle Tennessee that a thin glaze of ice could develop “on some bridges and overpasses.” In addition to creating “slippery travel conditions,” the supercooled fog leads to “rapid drops in visibility over short distances.”

Freezing fog forms when water droplets in the air are chilled below freezing but remain in the liquid state. With no nuclei to latch onto, they hang suspended until accreting on an object at a surface. This allows a slick blanket of ice to enshroud anything touching the ground.

Oftentimes, freezing fog gives rise to rime ice — a fractal structure that builds with time. These branchlike growths rarely cause much damage, since they aren’t too good at holding on to things. Instead, the crystalline curiosities are a spectacular sight to behold.

Needles and spikes leaped from trees in neighboring Fayetteville, resembling ghostly white cacti sprouting in a winter wonderland:

Rime ice was also sighted in Alabama, where a backdrop of freezing fog made for a mystical frozen sunrise.