Several studies have looked at lake ice quantity and its duration, but there is little research on the quality of the ice which directly corresponds to how safe it is to venture out on.
Several studies have looked at lake ice quantity and its duration, but there is little research on the quality of the ice which directly corresponds to how safe it is to venture out on.
Ice may look safe for a game of pick-up hockey on the lake, but as a new study out of York University found, looks can be deceiving. Warming winters are not only affecting ice thickness and timing – when a lake freezes and thaws – but also quality, making it potentially unstable and unsafe.
When lakes and rivers freeze, there are two predominant layers of ice, what’s called white ice and black ice. White ice is generally opaque, like snow, and filled with more air bubbles and smaller ice crystals, diminishing its strength and stability, while black ice is clear and dense with few air pockets and larger ice crystals making it a lot stronger.
“Ice quality is important because of its direct implications for load bearing capacity for human safety and also how much light will transmit under ice for life under frozen lakes,” says York Professor Sapna Sharma of York’s Faculty of Science.
Read more at York University
Image: A hand can be seen through a clear block of black lake ice (Credit: Joshua Culpepper)
