The cold has returned to Milwaukee and the water is slowly icing over once again. But if you stare out at Lake Michigan, you’ll see flowing water in the not-so-distant horizon. And there’s a good reason for that, as artist and educator Geo Rutherford can tell you.
Rutherford is an educator and content creator based here in Wisconsin, whose work focuses on bodies of water. Her TikTok, Geodesaurus, shares videos filled with facts about our waterways.
That includes Lake Michigan. Unlike most lakes, Lake Michigan has never completely frozen — at least not in recorded history. Rutherford says that's because of both the size of the lake and its location.
"You have this really hot, really deep body of water that stays pretty warm all the way through the winter. It's kind of retaining its heat through the winter and it's only if you get really cold weather and then you don't get a ton of wind that you're going to get that 90% frozen Lake Michigan," she explains.
This year, the lake has had considerably less ice than that, which is part of a larger trend. There are still parts of the lake that have ice, but that ice isn't as thick or durable as the ice on smaller lakes.
"You’re never gonna get like a perfectly beautiful, flat ice on Lake Michigan it’s always going to be kind of this amalgamation of ice building up on top of itself," Rutherford explains.
That amalgamation of ice includes "pancake ice," where ice doesn't form in a long sheet, but instead forms circular discs similar to a pancake.
Rutherford says the unusual conditions on Lake Michigan can also lead to unusual things like ice tsunamis, where strong winds blow ice chunks up to the shore, or ice volcanoes.
"That's what you'll see on the beaches, like when you go to the Indiana Dunes State Park or you go to one of these really sandy, giant beaches," she explains. "The ice is really built up, like people walk up onto the ice because they can't even see the water, so they're walking up onto the ice without even realizing that they're walking above potentially 6-10 feet of open air."
Geo Rutherford is an educator and content creator based here in Wisconsin. Her TikTok is called Geodesaurus, which includes her popular "Spooky Lakes" series that inspired her book Spooky Lakes: 25 Strange and Mysterious Lakes that Dot our Planet!.
_
