A rare-for-Vermont ice formation appeared late last month on the shores of Lake Champlain near Burlington’s Leddy Beach.
Pancake ice, which looks like the frozen form of those griddled goodies, is created only under certain conditions and generally in places with big wave action, such as the Antarctic, according to ice specialist Ted Maksym, an associate scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.
“You need a strong wind blowing in one direction,” Maksym said. “It’s up against the shore, and that confines the ice, and it kind of piles up like that. It’s just the perfect conditions to set that up.”
When it’s just below freezing, Maksym said, the ice forms in small crystals “that almost look like snowflakes” with rough edges. Instead of creating a flat sheet of ice, the pieces form “pans” that bash into each other.
“It’s like bumper cars at a fair,” Maksym said. “They’re constantly bumping into each other, and so any rough edges get rounded out, and you form these pancakes.”
This typically happens closer to shore; once an ice sheet forms, it dampens the waves, meaning it freezes more smoothly farther out into the lake.
The Leddy Beach pancake ice was visible in late January. The Burlington pancakes were quite small, and formed in a pattern that extended nearly to the open water.
“People in the Midwest and the Great Lakes might see pancakes a little bit more, like what you see in the ocean,” Maksym said. “But the ones you have there in Burlington, they don’t often occur.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Frozen pancakes”
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2025.
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