The Icicle Atlas

Icicles are familiar to anyone living in a cold climate. But what determines their shape and growth? Their distinctive forms emerge from the complex interplay between their evolving shape and the flow of air and water over their surfaces. These flows in turn control the release of heat needed to transform water into ice. Impurities in the water also play an important role, especially in the formation of ribs or ripples around the circumference of the icicle.

The Icicle Atlas is a collection of images, time-lapse movies, 3D printable files and time-series data on laboratory-grown icicles, made at the University of Toronto, Department of Physics. Each run of the icicle growing machine resulted in an icicle whose growth conditions were measured and controlled. These data were used in several published studies of icicle morphology.

The data in the Icicle Atlas is freely available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

The icicle data

There are over 230,000 images of icicles in the Atlas and hundreds of time lapse movies and 3D printable files. Each run of the icicle growing machine is a separate dataset under the Icicle Atlas runs dataverse.