The wonder of ice

Please feel free to share this post with your personal networks and to subscribe to this blog.

I see skies of blue, clouds of white

The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night

And I think to myself: What a wonderful world

            Robert Thiele

The recent warm weather has set the lake ice on an irreversible course toward disappearance, a part of an annual cycle. And what a wondrous thing it is, this seasonal transformation of our lakes, from blue-water paradise, to white desert, and back again. Right now my electric auger tells me the ice on Birch Lake is still a shade over two feet thick, but it’s slushy and watery on top and in decline.

It’s amazing how the cold turns the water into a new substance that gives us different ways to enjoy the lakes we love. Perhaps the ultimate happens when the ice forms smooth and clear before the snow comes and we can gaze down on the lake bottom as if through a pane of glass.  Then as winter advances the ice forms a rigid, safe surface, opening vast new acreage where can snowshoe, hike, skate, ski. And all the while, down below, the lake still teems with life, the fish and other creatures still moving about, still feeding, albeit slowed down by their cold-blooded metabolism.

It’s only a peculiar trait of water that makes this possible. Most liquids, as they cool, contract and become denser until they transition to the sold phase, the densest of all. Water acts differently. It contracts until it reaches about 39 degree F, then begins to expand until it becomes ice, about 10 percent less dense than the liquid phase, and thus able to float. If not for this property—if water behaved like other liquids—the ice would sink to the lake bottom, and ultimately the entire volume of the lake would freeze solid, perhaps never to thaw completely, and surely never to support an abundance of life.

Now, as winter’s grip loosens, the ice slowly fades. Sunlight, wind, and warmer temperatures go to work at the surface, but ultimately the ice melts from the bottom up. First a ring of water forms where the ice once met the shore. The space slowly widens. Sunlight penetrates the clear water. The relatively dark lake bottom absorbs the heat. The warming water goes to work on the ice. Gradually, the ice thins, until one day, perhaps aided by a warming and stirring wind, the water melts it all away and the lake lies fully open, sparkling in the sun.

Often we can actually watch it happen, the areas of water covered by ice decreasing by the hour. And then just like that, a new season has begun. Fish and other critters spawn. Loons come home. Water plants emerge. Seasonal cottages open, Piers are installed and boats launched.  Routine and inevitable as all this may be, it remains miraculous to behold. And so each year, as I watch the cycle of lake ice forming, then receding, I can’t help but say: “What a wonderful world.”