The Lake Guy on TV: Watching the Lakes Freeze

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A highlight of my year on the lake is watching the ice form, a process that generally covers a few weeks from mid-November into early December. It takes quite a few days to make a complete cover of lake ice, and I explained why recently as a guest on Rhinelander Channel 12’s Up North@4 program (the picture is from my visit to their set).

Water is slow to become ice because of something called the heat of fusion. It takes 80 times as much heat energy to melt a given amount of ice as it would to warm the same volume of water by about two Fahrenheit degrees. And that principle works in reverse: Once the water hits the freezing temperature of 32 degrees, it must give up a great deal of energy to make the transition to the solid phase.

I explained this to hosts Agnes Kozina and Dan Hagen, and I shared other interesting facts about how ice forms on our lakes. Did you know, for example, that under certain conditions water in the liquid state actually can exist at temperatures lower 32 degrees? You can watch the segment here. My part begins at the 14:30 mark. There’s much more about lake ice and lakes in winter in my book, A Lakeside Companion, which you can read about on this website. I hope you enjoy watching the progress of freezing on our lakes, and take pleasure in the snew season of adventure that arrives when the lakes are covered by safe sheet of new ice.