PELLSTON — The earliest “ice out” ever recorded on Douglas Lake was declared Saturday, March 16, setting another record this mild winter in northern Michigan.
This comes after the latest ice-in ever recorded, which was Jan. 6 — making this the shortest season of lake ice cover recorded at the University of Michigan Biological Station at 70 days.
For 93 years, scientists at UMBS, the 10,000-acre research and teaching campus nestled along Douglas Lake, have made the calls based on their observations of the lake.
The Douglas Lake ice-out date is when consensus determines that 75% of ice cover is gone from South Fishtail Bay, the deepest part of the south end of the lake.
The historic field station founded in 1909 has maintained statistics on ice-out dates for Douglas Lake dating back to 1931.
Previously, the record for earliest ice-out was set 12 years ago on March 20, 2012.
Last year’s ice-out date on Douglas Lake was April 13, 2023. Ten years ago, ice-out was declared April 29, 2014. In 1996, it was May 4. Fifty years ago, it was April 21, 1974. In 1931, ice-out was declared April 12.
Adam Schubel said winter weather has been “variable or noisy” during his eight years as resident biologist at UMBS.
When he returned from a family vacation in mid-March, Schubel was surprised to see that he’d have to again move up the annual staff contest to guess the spring ice-out date.
“Historically the deadline for our contest was March 25, but we’ve moved it up earlier each of the past three years,” Schubel said. “The variability is what makes it a riveting contest.”
In the long-term, there’s only a slight trend toward earlier ice-out — about one day per decade. But in the short-term, this year’s ice-out was 45 days earlier than it was just six years ago.
“We had close to our latest ever recorded ice out in 2018, which was on May 1,” Schubel said.
On March 13, three days before declaring ice-out on Douglas Lake this year, Schubel had to hop over a liquid gap at the beach to lightly tread out to the historic ice thickness measuring site, where he measured an ice thickness of 5.5 inches.
“It was melting remarkably fast,” Schubel said. “Temperature was the primary driver. Wind seemed to be a major factor near the end, when the ice sheet had broken up.”
Schubel and Dr. John Lenters, senior research specialist at UMBS, both won the 2024 trophy three days later on Schubel’s mother’s birthday.
“Interestingly, the bay iced in on Dec. 1, 2023, and then melted less than two weeks later on Dec. 10. Then it iced in for the season on Jan. 6, 2024,” Schubel said. “It’s done something like this the past two years. One thing I note from my observations is that waterfowl seem to appear on open water immediately, whenever it appears, as if they’re just monitoring lakes, waiting for them to thaw.”
Lenters studies changing winters in Michigan. He has a long-term interest in understanding the effects of changing lake temperature and ice cover on Great Lakes evaporation.
“It’s been a very warm winter throughout much of the Midwest this year, which is what we typically expect to see during an El Nino,” Lenters said. “But this year broke a lot of records, and it was even warmer than past strong El Ninos such as 1997-98 and 2015-16. So what we saw this year was a combination of El Nino with the long-term warming effects of climate change. Sort of a double whammy.”
Explore the UMBS data for Douglas Lake ice cover on MField.
The University of Michigan Biological Station has been home to scientific discovery since its founding in 1909. Our core mission is to advance environmental field research, engage students in scientific discovery and provide information needed to understand and sustain ecosystems from local to global scales. In this cross-disciplinary, interactive community, students, faculty and researchers from around the globe come together to learn about and from the natural world and seek solutions to the critical environmental challenges of our time.
