
Rare snow rollers spotted in field near Marlborough, UK - seanhandley
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-wiltshire-47108382
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twic
A couple of videos of rollers forming, in Ottawa and Ohio, both leaders in
snow-based technology:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=_GOMYlGZobk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=_GOMYlGZobk)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thswcC3Mz_8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thswcC3Mz_8)

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tzs
This reminds me, in a way, of sailing stones [1]. Although they happen in
quite different environments (snowy areas for rollers, deserts for stones),
they both are an inanimate thing clearly moving around without human or animal
help in non-obvious ways.

For convenience, here's the Wikipedia link for snow rollers [2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sailing_stones)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_roller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_roller)

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sandworm101
And we wonder why people once believed in faeries. If I woke up one morning to
see these in my front yard, elf magic would be a pretty reasonable option. If
I saw them rolling on their own I might decide to go back inside for fear of
crossing paths with an angry leprechaun.

~~~
TomK32
Or Brussels and its EU minions.

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qubex
Side note: as a non-American, it's hilarious (and sometimes slightly
irritating) to read place names in the <City>,<Country> format usually used by
Americans (albeit in <City>,<State>).

Firstly, pretty much everybody I know is aware that Marlborough is a city in
the UK. There's even a famous historical figure, the Duke of Marlborough,
associated with the place.

Secondly it kind of indicates that at some level the writer believes that US
states and foreign countries are similar organisational units, when actually
countries have greater independence and sovereignty than do US states.

It's certainly illustrative and useful for a wider audience, but... I dunno...
it still feels... a bit wrong.

(And yeah, there's probably a Marlborough somewhere in the US so American
citizens might get confused, but that's kind of the point too... like when I
say “I'm from Milan” and I get “oh, Milan, Texas?” back as a reply. “No ma’am,
Milan, _Italy_.”)

~~~
onorton
I'm from the UK. My home address is in Bangor, Northern Ireland. Almost every
employer (in the UK) I've interviewed at initially thought I was Welsh.

If I say "I'm from Bangor" to an American and they assume I'm American, which
one of these would they think I'm referring to?[0] There are two separate
Bangor Townships in Michigan alone.

It makes total sense to refer to the country and city/town when you are
addressing an international audience.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangor#United_States_of_Americ...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangor#United_States_of_America)

~~~
qubex
Yes, you are correct. I apologise to you too. I was a bit testy this morning
and I came off a more ill-tempered and quarrelsome person than I had intended,
and it is entirely my fault.

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bacon_waffle
I think the mechanism is different, but the rollers remind me of yukimarimo -
[https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/yukimarimo...](https://weaknuclearforce.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/yukimarimo/)

~~~
twic
> Yukimarimo were named by T. Kameda on JARE-36 in 1995. "Yuki" means snow in
> Japanese, and "marimo" is a ball-like growth of water algae which the
> yukimarimo resemble. [1]

> The plant was named marimo by the Japanese botanist Takiya Kawakami[b] in
> 1898. Mari is a bouncy play ball. Mo is a generic term for plants that grow
> in water. The native names in Ainu are torasampe (lake goblin) and tokarip
> (lake roller). [2]

The roller comes full circle!

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukimarimo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukimarimo)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marimo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marimo)

~~~
bacon_waffle
Nice find! I thought I had done a blog post with the reference to "snow down"
(the same phenomenon later named yukimarimo) in Paul Siple's account of the
first South Pole winter over in 1957, but apparently wrote that up for
something else... Perhaps a bit of wikipedia editing is on the menu for this
weekend!

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tedunangst
> He said he spotted them in a field he owns and at first thought they had
> been manmade but there were no footprints.

Obviously that just means they beamed back up to the mothership.

~~~
zdragnar
The footprints? That's some fancy tech.

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Luc
Hard to tell the scale. I'm guessing about 50 cm high?

~~~
Someone
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_roller](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_roller):

 _”They can be as small as a tennis ball, but they can also be bigger than a
car. Most snow rollers are a few inches /centimeters wide”_

So, they might be 50 cm, but if so, they would be large examples.

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ohiovr
Looks like they have tank treads

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076ae80a-3c97-4
Slow news day...

~~~
seanhandley
They call them "Sundays".

~~~
bitxbitxbitcoin
Especially Super Bowl Sundays.

