Recently, I was looking out the upstairs bedroom window at water dripping off an icicle. (Now that I’m retired, I have time to devote to really important work.) I began to wonder why the water didn’t freeze before it reached the end. And how could it drip at all when the air temperature was below freezing? Was I the first person to ever notice this?

Well, no. It seems icicles have been perplexing physicists for years. Stephen Morris is Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto (where there are a lot of icicles, pretty much all year round). Dr. Morris spent 10 years studying the shape and formation of icicles, taking over 230,000 photos, 400 videos and analyzing mountains of data. “And we still don’t understand it,” he admits. Although he did come up with some observations:

When water freezes into a solid, the molecules release heat, called “the latent heat of fusion.” The latent heat keeps the film of liquid on an icicle from freezing and transfers the heat to the air around it. This allows the water to flow down as the warm air around it flows up, resulting in the icicle’s long pointy shape. (Got that? Me neither.)

And have you ever noticed the evenly-spaced bumps on icicles? For some mysterious reason icicles always have the same bumpy pattern. No matter how big or small an icicle is or what the temperature is, the bumps are always one centimeter apart. “So, if you’re ever out in the woods and you’ve lost your meter stick,” Morris jokes, “you can just break off the nearest icicle and, you know, it makes a pretty good meter stick!” (And that’s about as funny as an icicleologist ever gets.)

Icicles are as beautiful as they are mysterious. But they can also be deadly. Every year in the US some 15 people are killed by falling icicles. In Russia, that number is closer to 100. In 2001, there were 74 icicle-related deaths in Moscow alone.

In 1903, in Cassopolis Michigan, a huge icicle fell on a police officer, cutting off the top of his head. In 1994, a “microwave-size” icicle fell from the 725-feet tall Neiman Marcus building in Chicago, killing Donald Booth of Wisconsin. The posh department store settled with his family for $4.5 million.

In 1776, the son of a parish clerk in Devonshire, England was killed by a falling icicle. His epitaph reads:

“Bless my eyes,

Here he lies

In a Sad Pickle

Kill’d by an Icicle.”

Yeah. I wish I was making that up. The poor kid. His only mistake was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now, for the past 249 years, everybody who read his tombstone has had a good chuckle at his expense, while wondering, what the heck is a “sad pickle”?