Melting away

According to science, we’re losing something magical

by

One day in mid-January I walked down the hill from my house to do something I’d never done before.

On the shoreline of Lake Monona, in the time it took my wife to get herself and our two daughters laced up, I clumsily cinched up a brand new pair of ice skates, my exposed fingers aching in the cold. Then I stood and took my first tentative steps out on the glassy frozen surface.

It was magical.

I grew up in Arkansas, where we most certainly did not walk on water at any time of year. When it did get cold enough to freeze, it was usually just a skim coat of ice. Pretty, but nothing like the stable surface I was skating on (if you can call what I was doing “skating”). Lots of other people were out, too. Skating, walking their dogs, fishing, even biking — using the lake in ways that are impossible for most of the year.

I gaped at the window beneath my feet. I could see right down into the lake where waves had molded ripples into the silty bottom. Aquatic plants reached toward the ice, moving almost imperceptibly with currents in the water below. (Okay, it was all invasive Eurasian water milfoil, but the visual was still stunning). My kids and their friends stumbled about on their own skates, making dozens of intentional falls to the clear surface, leaning their heads together and exclaiming as they peered into the beautifully weird artistry of air bubbles or the odd fish frozen into a foot-thick sheet of ice.

It’s rare to have conditions exactly right to get a smooth, frozen lake with no snow cover. In the nine years I’d lived near the lake it had never been so perfect for a pair of ice skates.

But that, of course, was then.

Two weeks later, as I trudged to my bus stop, the lake shimmered with large puddles of water thanks to above-freezing temperatures and a relentless drizzle that, on Jan. 22, I would have expected to be snow. No piles of plowed slush lined the streets. No cold, white coat dressed the sledding hill. Just the soggy, semi-frozen ground of Wisconsin in winter.

It felt like I was back where I’d grown up in the Ozark Mountains — where winter usually meant temperatures in the 40s and frozen precipitation was a rare treat. My mind flashed back to a presentation I saw 10 years ago as a graduate student here at UW-Madison. A climate scientist showed an animated map of projected conditions for regional climates. As he talked, the state of Arkansas drifted up on top of Wisconsin. This, he said, is the future.

Now you could argue that these warm spells are “just the weather.” And you would be right. I can’t pin these current puddles on global warming. It’s hard to talk about climate in singular moments in time. There’s enough variability to confuse things — one week is cold and the next is warm and, sure, next year could be full of snow and good ice and consistently wintry temperatures.

But, even if next year is an epic winter, that’s still just the weather — it tells us little about long-term trends. What about the next 10 years or 20? Chances are that a lot more of those years will look like our soggy January instead of winter as it ought to be. The winters of Wisconsin’s past — with deep snow and reliable ice — are becoming the anomaly. This schizophrenic season is becoming the new normal.

Our world is getting warmer and evidence of that fact is all around us. Farmers and gardeners are working with growing seasons that are 10 days longer than the long-term average. Wildfires are burning hotter, faster and bigger. Coastal areas grow ever closer to the water’s edge.

For me, though, evidence lies both out my front door and out my office window. My house is up the hill from Lake Monona. My office at UW-Madison’s Center for Limnology (the study of inland waters), sits on the shore of Lake Mendota. From these vantage points, it’s hard not to think of climate change in terms of the freezing and thawing of lakes. And, based on ice records that go back to the 1850s, our lakes are freezing later and thawing sooner.

Those early records were a matter of commerce — industrious ice purveyors wanted to know when Lake Mendota and Monona were good and frozen enough to head out with saws and ice tongs. A couple of these operations were built on “Ice House Hill,” which is now known on my side of town as the Olbrich sledding hill. Crews of men working 10-hour days would carve our lakes into blocks, pack them in sawdust and ship them by rail as far south as New Orleans. I like to imagine clear Wisconsin ice chilling someone’s Sazerac as they tap their toes to zydeco.

But we don’t send our ice somewhere else these days. We save it for ourselves. We take advantage of that window in the year when the lakes become more egalitarian. When we don’t need a motorboat to enjoy Madison’s lakes, just warm boots and faith that the ice will bear our weight. When it finally feels like winter has arrived.

It’s hard, as a human, to really grasp change over time. Each cold spell is like nothing we’ve ever seen. Each heat wave undoubtedly the hottest it’s ever been. Luckily, we have our history to show us our present. And what the history of Madison winters tells us is that, since records have been kept, we’ve lost a full month’s worth of ice on Madison’s lakes. A graph of Lake Monona perfectly illustrates this decline. While the graph has the usual peaks and valleys of “good” ice years and “bad” ice years, the trend is obvious. We’re not seeing winters capable of putting four month’s worth of ice on a lake anymore.

The impact of this change is, perhaps, best summed up by John Magnuson, the former director of the Center for Limnology, and a lifetime lover of Wisconsin winters. 

“Human beings have a strong sense of place,” he once told me. “They get homesick or long for the country they emigrated from and, in Wisconsin, our sense of place includes … winter. And in our area, that sense of place includes lakes. This sense of place affects how we see ourselves and what we do in our lives and what we hope our children will get to do in their lives.”

But, says Magnuson, our sense of place may need to shift to accommodate the new normal. “Historically [in the mid-1800s] Lake Mendota had about four months of ice. And right now we’re averaging about three.”

Maybe the ecological or economic impacts of that change aren’t catastrophic, he says, but “on the other hand, I’m unhappy. I’m actually sad that we’re losing winter as we knew it.”

And make no mistake, we are losing winter as we know it. In fact, it’s already gone. According to the Wisconsin State Climatology Office, the highest mean (or average) temperatures for each winter month — December, January, February and March — have all occurred in the last 20 years. It’s a trend that plays out well beyond Wisconsin. NASA recently announced that last year was the second warmest year in their 136-year record. 2016 was the warmest. In fact, 16 of the 17 highest global average annual temperatures have occurred since 2001.

These aren’t complicated theoretical climate models. These are simple thermometer readings. And they show that days like my adventure on ice skates are endangered.

I never thought I’d embrace winter. I remember my first year at college in Minnesota and the long, dark months where actual temperatures could hit 40-degrees below and how spring took seemingly forever to arrive. I longed to be hiking the Ozarks on a sunny 40-degree day, startling up roosting turkeys and listening for the hiss of a waterfall pouring over a bluff.

But I grew to love my adopted habitat. The muffled quiet of deep, new-fallen snow. The ambient clamor of a sledding hill full of kids. Snowshoeing through the woods trying to decipher animal footprints. And, as of a few weeks ago, bumbling around on a frozen lake trying not to break my tailbone.

As those things change, I’ll survive. I’ll find other ways to spend my time and maybe the rarity of such days will make them feel even more magical. But, somewhere down the line, probably well after I’m gone, they may not even exist. And, like Magnuson says, that makes me sad.

To think that, at some point in time, in the Wisconsin my children inherit or maybe the Wisconsin they pass on to their children, the months of ice fishing and skating and cross-country skiing and gazing in wonder at a frozen lake will have slowly, almost imperceptibly, moved from magic to myth.

A version of this story first appeared in a blog published by the UW-Madison Center for Limnology.