Yesterday, at 9:10 a.m., John Kucko, an anchor at WROC in Rochester, tweeted an image of a home off Lake Ontario in western New York that was completely covered in ice. A few minutes later, he posted the same photo (the one you see above) to Facebook. 

In the ensuing 30 hours, the image spread quickly across the internet, a (correct) confirmation that, as an image, it is arresting to look at, because it’s not everyday that you see a house encased in ice. 

Still, Kucko said later that he was astonished by the reaction.

“Never imagined this would go global the way it has,” he wrote on Facebook. “I knew it was a ‘cool’ story, but still (pun intended).”

It is a cool story, John, and also reminiscent of last year’s famed “ice car,” an automobile that was similarly the victim of a steady stream of windblown moisture from a Great Lake, in that case Lake Erie. 

One mystery about the photo, though, endured briefly: why the house next door seemed relatively unscathed. But that house, Kucko explained this morning, had a retaining wall, which probably helped keep a lot of freezing moisture at bay. 

The ice house, on the other hand, had “just rocks,” Kucko said.