Ted Bier, our senior research specialist for the Long-Term Ecological Research program, was recently photographed on Lake Monona holding this massive chunk of ice in front of the Madison skyline.
That picture led to the following story on The Capital Times website:
How thick is the ice on Madison’s lakes? Researcher Ted Bier almost didn’t have enough drill to find out this week.
Bier takes ice depth samples as part of his work for the UW-Madison Center for Limnology, and he was out in the middle of Lake Monona on Thursday to get a reading. The drill kept going and going until finally reaching water underneath the ice.
When they extracted the ice core that you can see in the photo above, the depth measured 65 centimeters, more than 25 inches.
“Generally speaking, all the lakes in the area had 2 feet or more of ice on them at some point in time this winter,” Bier said. “That’s 40 to 50 percent thicker than we usually have. I’ve been here 13 years and it’s the thickest I’ve ever seen.” – Read the rest on the madison.com website.