By Dr. Robert Thorson
New England is on thin ice getting thinner. Our lakes and ponds are freezing later, thawing earlier and getting more dangerous. This aspect of climate change hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.
Why write about winter ice during back-to-school days? For academics like me, spring cleaning comes in early fall, when I sort through a summer’s worth of clutter to make room for the next crop of bright-eyed students. Something interesting usually pops up.
There I was, thumbing through an issue of “Lake Line,” published by the North American Lake Management Society this summer. An article titled “Losing Winter” caught my attention. The subtitle read “Climate Change, Ice Phenology and the Winter Ecology of Lakes” (phenology is the study of periodic biological events such as bird migrations and the climatic conditions they correlate with).
Reading the article got me thinking about Hugh Ogden’s death as a phenological phenomenon. For nearly 40 years he was a beloved professor, poet and teacher of English at Trinity College in Hartford. Then, on New Year’s Eve 2006, he fell through thin ice . . . freezing while drowning . . . or was it drowning while freezing? I’m sure it doesn’t matter.
Hugh was a seasonal migrant to an island in Rangeley Lake, Maine, a jagged glacial gash in the forested interior. He was also a skilled natural observer and experienced cross-country skier. For him to fall through the ice required a patch of ice much thinner than he expected.
Indeed, according to local officials, the unusually warm weather had created dangerous conditions. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, statewide temperatures were above normal and precipitation was below normal; both can produce thin ice. Nationally, December 2006 was the 11th warmest December on record. Globally, it was the warmest since records began in 1880.
For the period 1846-1995, practically every ice phenology record in the northern United States shows a pattern of steady change toward either later freeze-up or earlier breakup. The best data and clearest pattern is for the northern Great Lakes for the years since 1975. On average, freeze-up has taken place 3.3 days later per decade, and breakup has taken place 2.1 days earlier. Geographically, the dates for thermal breakup are moving northward at about 40 miles per decade. Many lakes in southern New England are on the verge of not freezing at all. Those to the south are now ice-free.
Hugh and I were pen pals, albeit briefly. Initially, he contacted me about one of my columns. Soon we had what I would call a collegial correspondence. Just before his death, he sent me his most recent collection of poetry, “Turtle Island Tree Psalms” (2006), which we were going to discuss when he returned from Rangely, a rendezvous that sadly never happened.
I had planned to share with him one of my favorite stories about northern winters, Sigurd Olson’s account of skating across a frozen Minnesota lake before the recent warming trend. Under normal conditions, wind ruffles the freezing slush into a bumpy surface or snow mantles it quickly, preventing good skating. But on one occasion, “the ice everywhere was clear – seven miles of perfect skating, something to dream about in years to come.”
The joy of moving over open water by canoe, skates or skis allows “freedom of movement and detachment from the earth,” Olson wrote.
A canoe skims over open water when it’s in a liquid state. Skates slide over it when it’s a sheet of rock-hard crystal. Skis glide over it when it’s a fluff of snowflakes. The poet fell through all three of these watery media en route to his death.
Because I didn’t get a chance to share Olson’s words with Hugh, I read them to an audience gathered at a small public library. It was my first public reading – a small, personal tribute to a man I never met, one who spent his life trying to link human emotions to a world less natural than it once was.
Global warming did not cause the poet’s death. But there is a phenological relationship. Let his case history be a cautionary tale for the years of thin ice ahead.