The end of ice

🔒 Paywalled: The Midwest is experiencing a ‘lost winter.’ Here’s what that means.: Snow is absent, ice is dangerously thin, and many cities are experiencing their warmest winter on record
Washington Post, February 14, 2024

Growing up in Massachusetts, the Cambridge Skating Club would flood a depression each winter, & use a 19th century ice planing machine adapted to use a motor instead of horses to smooth the surface for ice skating. They're now looking at whether refrigeration is necessary to enable skating

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— David Sacerdote (@davidsacerdote.bsky.social) October 5, 2024 at 8:33 AM

Here's the PDF of the Nature article in the Bluesky post. The introduction begins:

"Lake ice is a critical component of the cryosphere upon which populations in the northern latitudes rely. Societies derive tangible benefits from ice-covered lakes, including for transportation, fishing for sport and food, recreation and entertainment. Ice roads, for example, provide a critical lifeline to northern and Indigenous communities during winter, as well as support trade and economic activity, including the movement of CAD$500 million in goods per year from the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road. In addition, ice cover strongly modulates the lakes’ physical characteristics, including temperature, stratification and light, which, in turn, influence under-ice ecology."

Although the freeze-up is well underway for many regions of the #Arctic, this is not the case across the Canadian Archipelago which is clearly a huge outlier in our satellite-era data record... Yikes! Data available from nsidc.org/data/seaice_...

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— Zack Labe (@zlabe.bsky.social) October 25, 2024 at 1:36 PM