Walking on water

Panorama - January 30, 2010

Today was a beautiful, clear, crisp day, and very cold with the wind chill of -34C. This meant that the weather warning continued on today. I took the above panorama when I was walking on water -- frozen water, that is. This means, of course, that we were walking on the lake ice. We hadn't planned on doing this, but Tawny and Taz took off into the woods on the edge of the lake and we had to go and get them. Because it was so cold, we decided just to walk across the lake diagonally, instead of walking back up to the road and back home. Standing on the lake and looking around is always very interesting as that is a perspective that you don't normally get, as you are either at water level (if you are swimming) or about 2 feet above the surface (if you are in a canoe).

There were two cracks running along the eastern edge of the lake and I couldn't figure out what caused them. It was obvious that it was something to do with the lake ice, but beyond that, who knew?

Then we came across this chunk of ice that had been pushed up - Tawny was very interested in sniffing it for some reason -- maybe because she's a dog? That gave me an idea for an explanation. We have had a lot of wind lately and my hypothesis is that the wind pushed the whole mass of lake ice up towards the shore which could have caused the cracking by (a) pushing the ice up onto the shore where it fractured, or (b) pushing the ice against the shore where it buckled. I think this photo with Tawny likely shows (b).