Winter has definitely made its presence known in the Northern Hemisphere and many of us are waiting for spring to save us from the bitterly cold temperatures. The season isn’t all that bad, with seeing the different ways the cold has visually affected the environment.
When the temperatures drop, it doesn’t surprise most people to see that water has begun to freeze over. Sometimes for moving bodies of water, like for rivers, people might even get a chance to see sheets of ice drifting along to the water’s current. What isn’t common to see is when the sheets of ice breaking against each other on the water and one Minnesota photographer captured a video of ice shattering on Lake Superior.
Dawn LaPointe had followed a hunch that some ice stacking would occur on the Lake and took a trip to Brighton Beach.
“As the water opened up, the sea smoke was whisked across the surface by the breeze,” explained LaPointe on Facebook. “The sparkles visible in some segments were from the sun gliding the frost flowers that had formed on top of the new ice overnight.”
Ice stacking occurs when cold weather, a large lake like Lake Superior, and a brisk wind combine to shift the sheets of ice on the water, causing the sheets to break and the ice seeming to grow like a pile of broken pieces of glass to beginning to form. According to LaPointe, the sound of ice stacking is also similar to that of breaking glass as the ice stacked on the shore.
Although the video seems to be sped up in parts, the photographer notes that all the footage in the video was shot in real time.
“Some ice stacking events move more slowly, especially when the wind is weaker or intermittent,” LaPointe elaborated. “The large sheets of ice shown in this video had pretty good momentum from sustained winds, but at one point the ice came to a groaning halt and the silence seemed almost deafening.”
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