Lake Erie has more ice in late January than any winter in the past 23 years

It probably comes as no surprise, considering the frigid weather we’re having, but Lake Erie is almost completely frozen over. 

Now, that’s not something new by any means — in fact it happens fairly frequently compared to all of the Great Lakes given it’s the shallowest. 

But this year, the big body of water has more ice in late January than it has in any winter in the past 23 years.

It’s happened a month earlier than last year, which was also a cold winter, peaking at 95 per cent coverage.

Scientists on either side of the border have said more ice helps combat erosion, lake effect snow and algal bloom. The shipping sector is more often than not considered to suffer the biggest downside from ice forming so expansively on the lake. 

As of earlier this week, Lake Erie was up to 94 per cent ice cover, according to data tracked by the U.S.’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). 

Mike McKay has been doing winter research on the watercourse since 2007, and says this month’s fast ice formation really caught him off guard.

“I have seen pretty much everything, I thought,” said the director of the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research. “Then … we went from basically one per cent of the lake being frozen on January 14 to 94 frozen [as of Wednesday].” 

Between Jan. 14 and Jan. 20, according to McKay, roughly 20,000 square kilometres of ice was added.

“It’s just been this precipitous rise in ice cover that, at least in my experience — the 15, 20 years I’ve been working on the lake like that — is unprecedented.”

McKay says he’s been reaching out to coast guard colleagues in Detroit, Cleveland, Amherstburg and Windsor who have assets on the water to collect samples, because of how rare this early freeze-over is and how quickly it occurred. 

“The lake is not dormant, but very much alive, particularly the western and central basins where we get algae blooms under the ice.”

Drew Gronewold says winter measurements of the lakes are critical to saving human lives and protecting the ecosystem.

“A lot of large lakes around the world don’t undergo the sort of same seasonal changes in terms of temperature, ice formation, even what we would call heat content — that’s like temperature integrated across the depths,” Gronewold, an associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan, previously told CBC News.

George Karaganis, a senior meteorologist with Environment and Climate Change Canada, says the rapid formation of fast ice this month is not unexpected, given conditions that were in place well before the start of the year.

“Lake Erie being as shallow as it is, is extremely quick to react to temperatures, with December being colder than average and the first half of January being colder than average,” said Karaganis. “The conditions [were] set for the lake to start [forming] ice quickly, and then when we had this abrupt cold snap, it just reacted very quickly.”

Karaganis says the colder temperatures and extent of ice cover are consistent with a La Niña year.

What stands out to him, however, is that prolonged cold spells and so-called “high ice years” are becoming increasingly rare—something he attributes to climate change. He notes the last time ice levels were this high at this point in the season was 2021–22.

“Before that, the last one that had this much ice 2014-2015,” said Karaganis. “Before that it was more periodic, it would be at least every four or five years that you’d see these high ice years.”