Mysterious Ice Disc Appears In Michigan River

A spinning ice disc in the Michigan River has got the whole community baffled in the recent weeks.

Vestaburg resident Jason Robinson, who took a video of the phenomenon, told Michigan Live that while he always passes by the river, he never once saw this kind of phenomenon.

"I've seen some pretty cool stuff in the woods -- things you don't expect to see," he said. Meanwhile, Robinson said that the ice disc eventually stopped spinning.

While many conspiracy theorists would say that it could have been created by aliens, science says it's because of physics.

Gizmodo notes that this spinning disc which can range in size from 3 feet to almost 700 feet, have been spotted across countless with cold climates.

Previously, it was thought that the ice disc is spinning because it has been caught in a swirl of water called an eddy.

Science Alert said eddies are little spinning currents that form when water flows over rocks or into an enclosed space.

If the spinning is caused by eddies then big and small ice disc would have had different spinning rates. But that was not the case as discs across that huge range of sizes rotate at pretty much the same rate.

A study published in March disproved the eddies theory. A team led by Stéphane Dorbolo from the University of Liége in Belgium found out that the motion is actually not caused by eddies but by the physical behavior of melting ice cooling the surrounding river water.

Using petri dishes, they found that the ice would actually rotate even when no current was present, due to the melting of the ice.

Meanwhile, while scientists have already identified what is causing the rotation, they are still unable to find out why the ice forms a disc shape.