"Climate change is shortening the season when lakes are frozen over, and some of the Great Lakes aren't freezing at all. The impacts will be felt year round".
"Every winter when Lake Suwa in Japan freezes, locals believe that the Shinto male god Takeminakata crosses the frozen lake with his dragon to visit the female god Yasakatome. He leaves only his footsteps on the ice in the form of a sinusoidal ice ridge called the omiwatari.
In 1397, Shinto priests began celebrating and recording the appearance of the omiwatari. They used the direction of the cracks left by the omiwatari to forecast the agricultural harvest for the upcoming summer. In the first 250 years of the ice record, Lake Suwa froze every year, except for three years during which time the region saw widespread famine. Since the turn of the millennium, however, the lake has only frozen seven times.
Lake Suwa is one of many lakes in the Northern Hemisphere that is rapidly losing its ice cover. In our research, we found that ice is forming later and melting earlier across these lakes, leaving a shorter period of seasonal ice cover. In recent decades, many lakes are experiencing the shortest seasons of ice cover ever recorded."
Sapna Sharma, David Richardson and Iestyn Woolway report for The Narwhal January 6, 2022.
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