Ice may look safe for a game of pick-up hockey on the lake, but as a new study has found, looks can be deceiving. Warming winters are not only affecting ice thickness and timing — when a lake freezes and thaws — but also quality, making it potentially unstable and unsafe. The problem, say researchers, is that the unpredictable and warmer winter weather is creating thinner layers of black ice and sometimes a corresponding thicker layer of white ice, the unstable kind. The two combined can make for treacherous conditions.
Geiger Mueller News Service