Super Cold / Ice

Seeing a Baltimore Ravens player doing a "snow" angel out of confetti on the artificial turf after the game a few hours ago (on artificial turf) inspired me to do a post about snow. Rather than snow, how about ice? I've been wanting to share these pictures since I had them developed by my friends at Photoworks a few weeks ago.

Over this past holiday break Catey and I were in Wisconsin. We took a day trip with Dad to Port Washington one day (December 30), and the three of us chanced to witness a miraculous display of ice formed on the  breakwater and everything nearby. We wandered slowly down this frozen pier, beholden to this frozen spectacle.  Part of our slow pace was the treachery of walking down a breakwater with a railing in the middle (none on the sides), walking on snow-covered ice, with the unfrozen yet seemingly deathly cold waters of Lake Michigan below us. The breakwater stands about 12 feet above the surface of the water and there are not many rungs for one to use to climb out, if one should fall in.

 

Precarious breakwater path, Port Washington WI, December 2012.

Mostly, though, our slow pace was the result of astonishment, at every step, of the beauty and impossibility of this ice. It surrounded thin branches of shrubs, ten times the diameter of each pencil-sized branch. How did it manage to extend this far vertically without a branch -- or the ice -- something -- breaking? What caused this? Even Dad, who has spent a lifetime near frozen water in frigid winters, remarked he'd never seen anything like it in his life.

Frozen cable and icicles, Port Washington WI, December 2012.

I researched weather leading up to our foray to see what chain of events caused this phenomenon. At first I thought it could have been: 

• Several days of daytime highs around 32° and nighttime lows below freezing. Precipitation each day of less than an inch, of rain that coated the ever-thickening branches during the day, then remaining frozen. Practically no wind, any day.

But it was 44° on Dec. 15. No way, this would have melted it all. So, maybe:

• The steam from the waters of the adjacent Port Washington harbor, coming from wave action creating airborne water droplets from slightly warmer waters (perhaps from the coal power plant nearby), coated the branches, day by day, with fine amounts of airborne mist, that gradually created the thick layer that we see. This was done under the calmest of conditions, with winds of less than 5mph, over about 10 days of temperatures remaining constant, highs at 32° and nighttime lows of 25° or so.

Then came Dec. 20: Daytime highs of 35°, 0.84 inches of precipitation (rain/snow) fell, it was quite windy (12 mph sustained, gusts to 28mph. The Milwaukee Journal/Sentinel reported a nasty storm. [Reading the comments to this article, by the way, is pretty amusing. 2logical1 posted: "Its been snowing in WI for how many years now? How much? when?, any thing out of the ordinary we need to know? ENOUGH jeeeeeeeeeez". Haha. This sounds like something  Dad might say, and I'd laughingly agree.] At any rate, the lake effect must have warmed the precipitation enough to make it lose its crystals in the liquid form, and the wind chill froze it into form. This is my final hypothesis, although it's still only a hypothesis.


And it remained below freezing until the day we were there. So, from what I can tell, these perfect plant popsicles were formed during a traffic-halting snowstorm and thankfully remained for us to see them, with clear roads and crisp blue skies.

For the full set of photos, click here. 

Icy aster stalk, Port Washington WI, December 2012.