Abraham Lake’s trapped bubbles create patterns that look suspended at different depths beneath the surface. The Alberta reservoir is especially recognisable in photographs where clear ice lets those layers remain visible.
Gas can be trapped while the water freezes
The bubbles remain gas enclosed by ice; they are not lumps of methane that have frozen solid. Methane associated with decomposition is part of the lake’s well-known bubble story, but a photograph alone cannot identify every bubble chemically.
Clear ice does not mean it was too cold to snow
The bare surface makes the bubbles easier to see, but it does not support the old explanation that the weather was too cold for snow. Surface appearance and snowfall history are different questions. Equally, a clear view into the ice is useful to a photographer without being a test of its strength. In these images, clarity serves the composition: the eye can move between cracks at the surface, bubbles below and reflections above, with several layers occupying the same small part of the frame.
Explore more: cracks and clarity on Lake Baikal; a very different kind of frozen bubble.
Successive freezing creates a layered pattern
The visual effect comes from gas bubbles trapped as the ice develops. Bubbles arriving at different stages can become enclosed at different depths, so the photograph shows more than a single row immediately beneath the surface. Overlapping discs and columns make the lake look three-dimensional even when the camera is pointed downwards. The gas itself has not become a stack of solid methane discs.
A reservoir has a changing water level
Abraham Lake is a reservoir on the North Saskatchewan River in Alberta. That setting matters when interpreting a winter photograph: clear-looking ice is a visual condition, not evidence of a stable surface suitable for walking. The original images by Fikret Onal illustrate the bubble formations, but an old thickness quotation cannot establish conditions elsewhere on the lake or on another day.
"Too cold to snow" is a fallacy. I forget the coldest temp recorded during a snowfall, in Siberia, but it was far colder than -30 degrees C.
ReplyDeleteI've lived in northern Manitoba all my life and it doesn't snow once it's colder than around -25 degrees Celsius
DeleteIt can't snow when it becomes too cold as the air can not hold enough moisture. Any snow that is in the air is probably due to wind blowing it in from the surrounding areas. That's why there is so little snow that falls in Antarctica or the Arctic. Besides, -40 is nothing in Alberta.
DeleteThose are not actual photographs--they may have been at one time but the airbrushing-photoshopping or whatever photo app this guy used has totally altered-disfigured-and misrepresented what at one time were probably nice (not amazing-not spectacular) photos and made them look like caricatures
ReplyDelete