Future of Frozen Lakes - Freezing of Lakes and the Evolution of their Ice Cover - page 270

Fig. 9.2 Lake Baikal ice season is quite complicated due to its great depth and horizontal scale. In
large lakes in general the ice shows significant horizontal displacements due to forcing from winds
or water currents. Photograph by Oleg Timoshkin, printed by permission

Frozen lakes have belonged to people ' s normal life in the cold regions. Solid ice cover

has been an excellent base for traf c across lakes and to transport cargo, provided the ice

has been thick enough. Indeed, ice cover has isolated island inhabitants from the mainland
in periods, when the ice is too weak to walk but still limits boating. Until about mid-20th
century, when refrigerators were not common, the cold content of lake ice was utilized by
storing lake ice for summer. Openings were sawed into the lake ice cover for household
water and for washing clothes at the site. For ice-covered lakes, special techniques were
developed for domestic and commercial winter

fishing.
This topic, Freezing of Lakes and the Evolution of Their Ice Cover, presents an up-to-
date (year 2014) status of knowledge of the physics of lake ice with applications. It is
based on a review of the literature and the research of the author during the last 20 years.
The focus is in fresh-water lakes, with river ice and sea ice results utilized where helpful.
The role of dissolved substances of the parent water is explained here based on the results
of sea-ice research.
A historical view is embedded with material from the more than 100 years long period
in lake ice research. Earlier literature of the physics of ice-covered lakes is quite sparse.
The important topics include Barnes (1928), Shumskii (1956), Pivovarov (1973), Michel
(1978), and Ashton (1986), and also the topic of Pounder (1965) contains much general
material on ice in natural waters. Pivovarov (1973) presented a scienti c monograph on

freezing lakes and rivers with weight on the liquid water body, while Ashton (1986) had a
more engineering point of view on this topic [see also Ashton (1980) for an overview