I love it when the great rivers of the North ice over. It happens so quickly! One day they are ice cold water about the greenish color of old time coke bottles and the next day they are skinned over with thin, pale ice.
I have only seen a shore-to-shore ice sheet form once - and it is very quick, like a lightening strike. It takes just a few calories of energy to convert water at 32' to ice at 32', so once it starts and a small spot reaches the perfect conditions for freezing just the expansion involved in freezing provides enough energy to fuel further freezing - so a sheet of ice will just flicker into existance from nowhere. Way fun to see!
When the water is flat calm the sheets that form can be huge! I think most freezing happens at darkest night when the air is coldest and the breezes of daytime hve faded away.
Soon idiots will start walking on the too-thin ice. Total idiots; really stupid. It seems like every year we require one person to fall through the ice and perish - a sacrificial lamb as it were, to the gods of inadequate ice cover. Then people hold off walking on it again for a few days.
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Funny you should mention this. Roads were awful when the snow started Tuesday morning. People were calling into the radio with accident reports. One guy called to say, "I wanted to report the two people kayaking on the Yahara right now are having NO traffic problems!" He was serious. Two people were actually kayaking in that crap weather. Weirdos.
LOL. I know it's not nice to laugh, but you Swami sure can make things oh so darn funny.
Swami - this is wonderfully written! You could do a short story about this.
I'd love to see that. The closest I get to that is hearing the ice cubes drop down from my automatic ice maker in the freezer.
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