ice coverage on lake superior 2021 Archives • Into the Light Adventures

Lake Superior Ice 2021, I wanted to finish this week off with the last of my winter snow photos of Lake Superior. It is actually raining here today. So all this ice you see in these photos is but a memory now. These photos were all taken with a drone at the end of February. There were quite a few nights of -18 F to create this much ice on this giant lake.

Lake Superior is not only the largest of the great lakes, it also has the largest surface area of any fresh water lake in the world. It contains 3000 cubic miles of water. That is enough water to fill all the other great lakes plus 3 additional Lake Erie’s.

It is hard to describe the size of the ice heaves, shoves or I call the big ones cliffs out in the middle, that you see in these photos.

Lake ice formation is dynamic. Even when a lake is completely frozen, the ice is not stagnant. It expands and contracts as it warms and cools. Differences in day and night temperatures can be large enough to cause the ice to crack. As the air temperature drops at night, lake ice cools and contracts. Since the ice is stuck to the shoreline, the entire sheet cannot contract as a whole, so cracks develop in the ice.

When the ice warms during the day, it expands. This expansion can cause a collision between both sides of the crack, which can cause the ice to buckle up at that pressure point.

This picture below, I am standing over in the shadow of the trees and I cannot see over the ice chunks closest to the beach. They are that tall.

This is my view from the shoreline so you can see how tall this first row of ice is.

So I can only imagine how tall these ice formations are, farther out into the water. By the look of the shadow I can Imagine I am just a tiny speck if I were standing near it.