A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
shuga
Shuga is an accumulation of spongy white lumps of ice a few inches across, floating at the surface and formed from grease ice or slush that has been worked by waves. It is one of the named stages in the formation of sea ice, sitting between the initial slush and the first coherent sheets, and it looks like the sea has been filled with wet snowballs.
Etymology
The word is Russian and came into English through the international ice terminology, which is a multilingual vocabulary assembled from the languages of everyone who works in ice. Nilas is Russian too, sastrugi is Russian, polynya is Russian, pancake and grease and rotten are English, and bergy is Norwegian by way of Dutch.
Notes
The sequence is worth knowing in order because it is a clock. Frazil crystals form in the water column, gather into grease ice at the surface, are worked into shuga or slush by wave action, congeal into nilas or pancake ice depending on how rough it is, and then thicken into a sheet. Reading which stage a stretch of water is in tells you how long it has been freezing and how rough it has been.