Dr. Bella Oleksy (University of Colorado, Boulder) and I recently published a paper about the winter season in Mohonk Lake in the American Geophysical Union journal JGR Biogeosciences. We used a >90 year dataset of ice observations made possible by the Mohonk Mountain House, Dan Smiley, and the Mohonk Preserve. We matched that with more recent observations of water temperature (~40 years) and high frequency winter data (~2 years) to try to understand how Mohonk Lake has changed and continues to change. Our accessible summary from the paper is below and here is figure from the paper showing the trends of more variable, shorter, and more intermittent winter seasons – that will only likely get more extreme with coming climate change.
Accessible summary from the paper here:
“Lakes worldwide are losing ice cover in response to climate change. We used a rare and nearly century-long data set of ice formation and ice clearance records to examine trends, variability, and drivers. We found that ice cover is getting substantially shorter and more variable with winter ice duration about a month shorter now than it was a century ago. Using under-ice temperature measurements from the most recent three decades, we found differences in under-ice temperatures affected by lake ice duration.”
Here is a spotlight on the article [link] written in the science news magazine, Eos, published by the American Geophysical Union.
I once had the opportunity to visit Lake Mohonk in the winter, where the ice used to sparkle for months. Reading the research of Dr. Bella Oleksy and her team, I felt like I was witnessing the past slowly fading away – winters are shorter, ice is more fragile. At times like these, I turn on Sprunki Retake , finding a sense of “freezing” through music and rhythm – a way to hold onto memories amid change. Hopefully, we can still do something to make winter more than just a memory.