See how the locals enjoy the lake when the temperatures drop in this immersive short by Trevor Hawkins of Mammoth. When Lake Lotawana freezes over each winter, the icy surface becomes a playground for young and old. And skating, ice fishing, and other recreation on frozen lakes is crucial to many communities’ sense of identity. Other communities rely on fish plucked from frozen lakes as protein for sustenance over the rest of the year. In the northern reaches of Canada, many communities are connected only after lakes and rivers freeze over, allowing a web of temporary roads to wind across the landscape.
If the ice breaks up early-or doesn’t form at all-the plankton newly-hatched fish rely on for food may emerge too early harmful algal blooms may be more likely and lake water evaporates away, leaving the lakes smaller and even more sensitive to future heating.Īnd the frozen lakes matter to people. And the length of that cold, quiet period matters. Ice sits like a lid on top of the lakes, keeping the water inside cool and still. “Ecologically, ice is almost like a reset button on a lake in the winter,” says Sapna Sharma, a lake expert and biologist at York University in Canada and the lead author of the study. The frozen period is crucial for both lake ecology and for the culture of people who live around or near their edges. More than half of these lakes freeze over every winter. There are around 117 million lakes dotted across the planet’s surface, from tiny kettle lakes a stone’s throw across to Lake Superior, which covers over 31,000 square miles. And as Earth warms, the authors of the new analysis say, tens or even hundreds of thousands of lakes around the world will freeze less-or maybe even not at all. The ridge would come early some years, a few days later others, but the lake nearly always froze solid enough for the god to make his annual pilgrimage.īut since the Industrial Revolution, the inexorable impacts of warming have thinned out Lake Suwa’s ice, leaving the lake dark and unfrozen more years than not.Īnd Lake Suwa is far from alone, according to new research published Monday in Nature Climate Change: Around the world, lakes are already freezing less, and for shorter stretches of winter, than they did before climate change gripped the planet. The priests carefully recorded the date that the lake froze and the ice ridge appeared, each year from 1442 onward. Partway through the winter, the ice would crack and refreeze, creating a long, jagged ridge stretching from shore to shore: the footprints of a god walking across the lake to see his beloved, the story goes. For hundreds of years, Shinto priests living on the banks of Lake Suwa, in the Nagano Prefecture of Japan, watched the surface of the lake freeze solid each winter.
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