No need to go to Iceland, Harbin has its own diamond beach

Harbin's "Diamond Sea" is the most breathtaking wonder on the banks of the Songhua River in winter. When the extremely cold air carries ice crystals across the river, the ice layer several meters thick undergoes fission and rebirth in the magic of minus 30 degrees, condensing into a diamond vein stretching for several kilometers. When the morning light penetrates the rime forest, the ice crevices refract the aurora intertwined with cold blue and golden red, as if the stars of the Sahara Desert have fallen into the northern ice field. The ice ridges pushed ashore by the ice waves grow like a crystal forest, and the two-meter-high ice ridges continue to crystallize in the north wind, growing new geometric facets every day. When the midday sun shines directly, the entire ice field turns into billions of prisms, refracting the silhouettes of tourists into a kaleidoscope of rainbow colors. Walking through it, you will hear the humming of a pipe organ from deep in the ice, as the river continues to carve blue ice caves under the ice shell. The twilight injects mysterious indigo into the diamond sea, and the cracks in the ice layer float with a faint green phosphorescence, which the local fishermen call "ice soul." At this time, the copper bell of the horse-drawn sleigh on the ice becomes particularly clear, carrying a girl in a mink coat across the star-studded ice surface, raising fine ice grains like a comet's tail. When the church bells ring in the cold mist, the entire ice sea turns into a resonant crystal celestial body, and even the white mist exhaled condenses into tiny diamonds suspended in the air.