The Nature of Ice

The Nature Of Ice
January 11 & January 13

Earlier this winter, a neighbour dropped in, and during the course of the conversation, asked what I knew about anchor ice. Truth was, I couldn’t recall ever hearing the term before, although apparently his father spoke of it often. My own father always spoke of “good ice”, comforting words indeed whenever he’d send me out on the Bay of Quinte with the old Oliver tractor and a wagon to bring home a load of wood from a tree line farther up the shoreline. I much preferred that term, to hearing him state, “Ice should be okay by now.”
Earlier this winter, a neighbour dropped in, and during the course of the conversation, asked what I knew about anchor ice. Truth was, I couldn’t recall ever hearing the term before, although apparently his father spoke of it often. My own father always spoke of “good ice”, comforting words indeed whenever he’d send me out on the Bay of Quinte with the old Oliver tractor and a wagon to bring home a load of wood from a tree line farther up the shoreline. I much preferred that term, to hearing him state, “Ice should be okay by now.” For the most part, ice was ice to me. It formed on the bay with the first cold snap, then broke free and headed east with the current in the spring, but I always wondered how it got around all the tips of the peninsulas, before finally ending up in Lake Ontario. Sometimes it wasn’t always successful, and giant slabs of it, forced by the strong westerlies, would shove up on shore in gigantic ice mounds. Now and again, the mounds of flowing ice would work their way up onto the township road, and on one occasion, actually blocked the road completely, until the township road grader and plow could move it enough to allow traffic to pass.
But, getting back to anchor ice, the first person to come to mind who would have an answer on this, was friend Doug Sadler of Peterborough. Now in his 80s, Doug wrote a column for over 50 years in the Peterborough Examiner, and just retired a year ago this month from the weekly grind. Doug’s winter columns were always inspirational. While the man may not have gone so far as to actually embrace winter, he was certainly very attune to the season, writing volumes of material on the subject, photographing its many moods and even winter camping. His book, “Winter, A Natural History” would have information.
In this praiseworthy hard cover book of both text and spectacular photographs, Doug speaks of different ice forms, including frazile ice which is a familiar term these days to anyone who lives along rivers. If moving water is super cooled, it will form small ice crystal lattices called fraziles. These can develop into slush and be carried downstream to freeze and accumulate quite thickly at any obstruction it encounters. Carried under the solid ice it will build up in a hanging dam, resulting in flooding.
Anchor ice is also formed in moving water, and many feet of this, according to Doug Sadler in his book, can form in a river on very cold nights. Through clear water, it looks like weeds with long tentacles rising up out of the mass. Doug explains that it probably forms under the surface from supercooled water trapped by turbulence around the rocks. As the day warms it becomes dislodged and rises to the surface. In the St. Lawrence River anchor ice regularly forms in massive quantities covering several square kilometres, well over a metre thick.
In his book, Doug devotes several pages to ice, speaking of black ice and white ice, sea ice and pancake ice. He also makes reference to ice travel, when ice surfaces form thick enough to be come ice roads which can carry heavily loaded trucks all winter. Around here, ice travel, except by snowmobile, ATV, and occasionally cars and trucks, is not the popular custom it once was, when winters arrived in December, and stayed. An established winter road across the Bay of Quinte, from Big Island to Point Anne many years ago peeled off more than half the normal highway distance to Belleville. Even I was among the daring many years ago, once taking the ice road from the mainland to Amherst Island. It is something I likely would never do again, as I well recall the thrill of reaching the far shore, and my tires finally touched terra firma!
I never really got used to the eery sounds that ice makes during its expansion, particularly when I was on it. Although my father assured me that it was a positive sound, guaranteeing a solid surface, it was not a sound I liked to hear 100 metres from shore while pulling a ton or so of wood. The knowledge that kept me thinking positive was the absolute brute strength of ice as it pushed and heaved huge boulders, trees and sometimes shoreline boat houses high into the air. As our chainsaw cut through the heavily scarred century old trees that had been unceremoniously bulldozed on the shoreline by the scouring ice, one couldn’t help but be impressed with the strength of the thick ice, ultimately psyching us up enough to set off on our way home with our harvest.
Ice does not always give up its secrets easily. We have learned much over the years about ice, and Doug’s book must be a pioneer, as not many references on the subject are readily available, other than the Internet. While the definition of anchor ice is now easier to comprehend, it doesn’t explain why this feature of winter nature, normally confined to flowing rivers, would exist, as it apparently has, in the sedentary Bay of Quinte. Doug’s book doesn’t reveal that answer. And I’m not driving out on the ice to find out!