We had earlier snowfalls, but winter has just started, season-wise, and it is a slow start, there’s not much winter anywhere.
There is a great deal of green and brown and you may have to pray or will the advent of snow.
Back in August, I predicted an early winter.
There are stars and pancakes on the back roads that are not on the webcams.
It is neat to see these late December sequential images of the weather cams in Wawa (you can see the goose) and Moonbeam (you can see the UFO spaceship, a tourism favourite icon); Kirkland Lake (good views of the south ‘Y’ looking south) and Mattawa (the roundabout ). And in Fort Severn near the polar bear encounter (good view of the stunted tree growth of the Hudson Bay Lowlands) .
It is amazing to see where Big Brother is located and the lack of snow.
When looking at areas of open water there are a couple of ice formations to identify and understand how they are formed.
Ice stars
Ice stars have that distinctive pattern with jagged dark arms, with little branches that radiate from the base of the dome or open hole and run across the top of the ice sheet.
Some think these are formed by freshwater “seals,” the beaver, river otters and muskrats, some call them “spider holes.” Not so.
I was reminded of Sheldon Cooper and The Big Bang Theory program when at the prestigious Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut I located Dr. John Wettlaufer. He is a theorist; his research is condensed matter physics.
(I knew I should have paid more attention in Grade 12 physics.) He said, “I am trained as a condensed matter theorist and have a wide variety of research interests in soft matter, statistical physics and applied mathematics.
“I am interested in trying to construct simple but observationally constrained theories and analogue experiments for complex phenomena in nonlinear dynamics, fluid dynamics, astrophysics, biophysics and geophysics – particularly rapid climate change.
“The scales of interest range from atomic to astronomical units. I collaborate with people from many disciplines and my students and post-docs come to Yale from departments of engineering, physics and applied mathematics.”
His current project: “Stochastic processes, asymptotic analysis and other approaches and methods from modern applied mathematics and physics, along with numerical simulations to probe a broad range of problems including the microscopic theory of melting, the mechanisms underlying cosmogony, climate dynamics, information theory and turbulence.”
(I had to look up cosmogony, which is the branch of science that deals with the origin of the universe and stochastic, from the Oxford Languages dictionary, “having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.”) So there.
Professor Wettlaufer was prompted to investigate star patterns when looking out of an airplane window landing in Chicago and noticed a frozen lake scattered with the distinct shapes.
He said, “The star patterns are formed when a hole in a recently frozen lake allows water to swell up from beneath and spread over the snow-covered surface, leaving dark fingers of melted ice stemming from a central point.
"Physicists had suspected that the fingers form because of a domino effect: the water starts flowing in one direction, causing the snow to melt faster in that region and thus helping the water to flow faster.” But no one had ever constructed a model to see if this idea was correct.
With a colleague, Dr. Victor Tsai they performed tests in the lab to see if their model matched the real-world, by pumping water at a temperature of 1 °C through a dish of slush held below freezing. They concluded that their model did not perfectly predict the number of holes but was right 95% of the time.
Their study has direct applications involving instabilities, such as the fate of floating ice in polar oceans. “We hope more people notice wintertime lakes with a different eye to these stars,” he said.
For the most part, we see these star patterns long after they have frozen solid. You will see the faint darcy (movement) flow lines formed by the snow and water that flows into the centre up flow hole in the star.
Ice pancakes
The second feature to look for is ice pancakes.
They’re best described as generally circular ice formations that range in size and thickness. It is typically grouped, and the rimmed edges of pancake ice pieces are often raised due to frequent collision with other ice.
The accumulation of slush and frazil ice, which is a collection of ice crystals that take shape on moving water, also contributes to the raised edges of pancake ice.
I reached out to Oceanwide this company features travel trips to the Arctic and Antarctica and their travel customers see pancake ice all the time.
They describe pancake ice as a term used to describe generally circular ice formations that range from 30 cm (12 inches) to three meters (10 feet) across and up to 10 cm (4 inches) thick.
“Pancake ice is typically grouped, and the rimmed edges of pancake ice pieces are often raised due to frequent collision with other ice. The accumulation of slush and frazil ice, which is a collection of ice crystals that take shape on moving water, also contributes to the raised edges of pancake ice.
“It is commonly formed among grease ice, which is a thin layer of ice that gathers on the surface of agitated water (such as swelling seas) and often includes frazil ice and slush. When the floating ice rinds of grease ice break up, pancake ice forms out of the pieces.
Although in northern Ontario we see pancake ice primarily on rivers that do not freeze in the winter, in polar latitudes these pieces congregate into ice floes.
From Oceanwide, “Pancake ice is said to be increasing in the northern waters and some researchers speculate that climate change could be a contributing factor.”
Research asserts that pancake ice buildup may be accelerating temperature rises. Because much of the larger Arctic/Antarctic sea ice has been decreasing, more surface water has been exposed to wind. The generation of waves from this wind has led to the agitation in which pancake ice often occurs.
You can go on an Oceanwide cruise to Antarctica to see large-scale ice pancakes.
Paddling has continued on the Mattawa River. It is mild, see the December photos. We are no longer the Great White North but keep your eyes peeled for these ice formations, you never know what you will find when you head outside to the back roads in any weather.
