Giant snowballs (Photo Credit: Sergei Bychenkov)

Imagine going to the beach and finding thousands of perfectly shaped snowballs scattered around. That is exactly what the lucky residents of Nyda in Siberia’s Yamal Peninsula have encountered since late October.

The snowballs that cover an 11-mile stretch of the beach range from the size of a tennis ball to almost 3ft across, or about as big as a basketball. According to the village administrator, the balls were created after water from the Gulf of Orb rose up onto the land and covered the sandy beach. The area’s freezing temperatures caused it to partially turn to ice.

Melting spheres form a ‘snowball wall’ (Photo Credit: Alexei Primak)

As the rest of the water retreated, the ice chunks rolled over in the moist sand and with a little help from the wind and temperature, created a beautiful winter wonderland of snowballs. The residents of Glen Harbor in Michigan experienced a similar phenomenon in 2014, except in their case, the snowballs were as big as boulders!

Resources: bbc.co.uk, dailymail.co.uk