Neat Lake Champlain Ice Pictures

With Vermont experiencing 'wintry mix' again, and the sidewalks covered in ice and ball-bearing shaped sleet, it is necessary to think about ice a lot when navigating around.  It's not all bad, though.  The cycles of freeze and thaw have brought some amazing ice formations to Lake Champlain.

About a week ago, during a thaw and before the lake froze most of the way across, my friend Neahga was down by the lake and captured some amazing scenes of ice and water.  Some of it looked a bit like frazil ice, and it seems to have formed when a thin layer of ice offshore fractured during a thaw.



Click for more...

Lake Champlain 'Closed' by Ice?

This morning, while walking towards the UVM campus in single digit temperatures, I noticed something odd about the lake. It took me a minute to realize what it was, but I realized there were no little ripples or waves. None at all. There wasn't much wind at the time, but even during seemingly caml days the lake always has a few ripples on it. Also, the reflections were just a little bit weird. They seemed kind of warped and blurred.

It took me a minute to realize what had happened. The lake had frozen over. From what I could tell, the ice extended all the way across the lake.



(Note the thicker ice in the harbor, which is much whiter because its surface is bumpy and it is covered in snow)

Beauty in Destruction

Earlier this month I was walking across a parking lot near a construction zone and found this:



I'm not sure exactly what it was, but it definitely wasn't supposed to be in a runoff area. It was also really beautiful.

It was a very cold morning, and the morning sun was melting some snow on the Davis Center on the UVM campus, which was then refreezing into icicles that I unfortunately could not reach to color.




This has been a long winter, and as the cold stubbornly refuses to leave (it is in the single digits out there right now), I keep alternating between not wanting it to end, and feeling nostalgic for summer. Oddly, I am somehow not as excited for the Vermont spring, muddy and dark and cold but full of new life and rushing water. I am hoping that as it comes I will be glad to see it.

Neat Stylized River Maps

My friend Eli just linked to a website of stylized river maps, created to look like subway maps. These maps simplify the tracks and courses of rivers, and act as another way to think about how watersheds are laid out. Pittsburgh does show up on one of the maps, too!



The maps are too large to post on this blog, but go to this website to see them for yourself!

Vermont Buried in Snow

Vermont, and many other parts of the northern hemisphere, are buried in snow.

It's been a very snowy year here.  The coldest of the winter has probably passed, but snows and below-freezing temperatures have continued.  Most areas of Vermont, even in the Champlain Valley, have 2 to 3 feet of slow on the ground.  Along roads and sidewalks, the berms and piles of snow are 4 to 6 feet tall.  I even saw one pile of snow near a parking lot that was over 15 feet tall!  Walking is an adventure even in the cities, and outside of plowed areas, travel is not possible without cross country skiis or snowshoes.

Truly, cold weather is here.

The Panther Hollow Lake 'Delta'

As water flows into Panther Hollow Lake from Panther Hollow Run, it slows down. This causes it to drop sand and other coarse sediment near where it enters the lake. The resulting formation is a small delta, with features also found in much larger deltas.

This delta, as well as silt and clay deposited elsewhere in the lake, are leading to the lake filling with sediment, which results in a smaller, muddier, and more polluted (due to shallow water becoming warmer in the summer) lake.

Thunder-Wintry-Mix

Thunderstorms with rain are very common in many parts of the world, usually during times of warm weather.  Thundersnow is much more rare but does happen on occasion. For some reason, it has happened several times in several different places this winter, including New York City, Boston, and Chicago.  Last night Vermont had something even weirder - Thunder-Wintry-Mix.


Ice and snow on trees atop Chipman Hill the day after the ThunderWintryMix.

Winter Color Part 2: More Colored Icicles

Last week I posted some pictures of colored icicles.  Since then I have become very interested in icicles as features of 'micro-watersheds' - areas where snowmelt, rain, and other precipitation run off of impervious surfaces like rooftops.

To get people thinking about icicles and how water moves through them and their surrounding urban landscapes, I've been putting food-coloring dye on icicles in prominent places in Middlebury, Vermont and Burlington, Vermont.  The results are striking in some cases, and illustrate just how quickly water can actually move through these seemingly static formations.

(do note that none of these icicles are in dangerous locations where they could fall and cause damage or injury, and any icicles that ARE should be safely removed if possible and not tampered with)

Icicle Experiment: Color in the Dead of Winter

This winter is hitting hard.  While the coastal areas are pounded by blizzards, Vermont has been locked in a deep freeze.  Between January 2 and January 26, the temperature never reached the freezing point.  In fact, last weekend, the temperature plunged well below zero, with most areas reaching -20F and even the thermometer near my relatively warm window reaching -15F!  On January 26, the temperature in much of the Champlain Valley rose to 33 F for around an hour, then dipped below freezing again.  It isn't likely to break the freezing point again any time soon, either.

This cold weather, following a period of substantial snow, is perfect icicle weather.  Icicles on roofs usually form when snow is melted when the air temperature is below freezing, due to sunlight and/or heat leaking through from inside of a building.  As slow water in the most literal sense, icicles very visually illustrate where water flows from the tiny watersheds of roofs.

After seeing some road ice along a Pennsylvania interstate that someone had somehow colored, I decided to try something similar with icicles!  I've started a project where I drip biodegradable food coloring on icicles.  This serves two purposes: to make people notice and think about the water in icicles, and to let me see how and where it is flowing through these ice formations.

Fun in Subzero Temperatures

Vermont is locked in a deep freeze, with most areas falling somewhere between -15 and -30 last night.

I tried a couple of experiments in the cold air, mostly from inside via a quickly opened then shut door.  It's COLD out there!



If you toss boiling water into subzero air, it turns into snow/steam immediately!  Very little touches the ground - if it were even colder the entirety of the water would evaporate or turn to snow in midair.  Not the best video, but you get the idea.


Ever wonder what happens to soap bubbles when it is really cold?  Maybe not, but I did.  I blew some bubbles out the door and they quickly gained a very 'plasticy' texture.  These bubbles don't disappear if they pop, instead they slowly deflate or even retain their form.  A few popped in midair and spiraled downward like crashing blimps.  Very neat!

More to follow, including colorful icicles.

Arctic Blast Expected in Vermont; More from Pittsburgh Sketchbook

The coldest weather in at least a couple of years is heading for Vermont.  Temperatures (Farenheit) this weekend are going to range from single digit highs to lows near -20.  This is not terribly unusual for Vermont; it happens every now and then and used to happen more often.  I've never been in temperatures this cold, though.  I really want to try tossing boiling water outside in subzero temperatures, so if it gets cold enough, I'll give that a try.  I also need to fill up my gas tank, apparently that makes it easier to start your car when it's cold and I do need to drive on Monday morning.

When I was in Pittsburgh last week I made a few more sketches.

  Click below to see more.

Midwinter Builds In

The January Thaw has come and gone, and now seems like a distant memory as the northeastern United States moves into one of the most notorious of its many seasons: midwinter.  While this Vermont winter isn't particularly unusual in its harshness, it IS significantly colder than last winter was.  Pittsburgh has been experiencing more unusual cold, as mentioned before.

ARkSTORM - Could What Happened in Australia Someday Happen in California?

In the last few weeks, Australia has been hit with downright apocalyptic floods.  Entire cities have been flooded, normally-dry creeks have risen to shocking levels, and tragic loss of life has occurred.

To most of the people who read this blog, Australia is a far away place.  The floods are shocking and upsetting, but they are occurring in a place that is very different than the one we are familiar with.

The uncomfortable truth, however, is that such storms CAN happen in the United States as well.  In fact, that similar floods have happened in the not-that-distant past - as close to home as California.  In 1862, a series of intense storms turned the entire Central Valley into a lake, and entire cities were wiped off the map.  Geologic evidence indicates that EVEN STRONGER storms have happened since the last ice age.  And, a warming climate could make future storms of this sort more frequent than they have been in the past.


Above: this remote ridge in California's Los Padres National Forest is called Hurricane Deck for a reason.  The Transverse Range of southern California does a very good job of blocking and amplifying storms that approach from the south, and in extreme conditions, areas of these mountains have been known to get over 20 inches of rain in a DAY.


Note:  I apparently misspelled this as 'ARcSTORM which is, I guess, some sort of GIS program.  The correct spelling is ARkSTORM.  A lot of people have been finding this blog page because they made the same spelling mistake as I did.  

Please see this USGS site for info on a project to raise awareness and increase preparation for such a storm system.  Click below for more info and thoughts on the potential for major flooding in California.

Toowoomba Flood - Incredible Flash Flood in Urban Waterway

The following incredible YouTube video has been making the rounds on the internet. It shows a flash flood quickly raising in level and tossing cars like plastic toys.

There has been a lot of talk about the influence climate change may have had on this flood. I haven't heard much talk about how watershed conditions may have made the flood worse as well. So, I pulled up a map of this creek.  Click below to see what I found.

Panther Hollow in Midwinter

In the January Thaw post I made a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that Pittsburgh isn't usually below freezing for many weeks at a time without a thaw.  It's been a COLD winter here, though, and this winter there really haven't been a lot of thaws.  This morning the lows were in the teens (Fahrenheit) and the highs were in the mid to upper 20s.  This is the city I drove into last night, and the city I drove out of last August was muggy and hot.  The change is quite dramatic!

Today I bundled up and explored Panther Hollow in the cold.