Icy Surprise.

1-16-13 SHORT HILLS: We got an inch of wintry-mix last night, and this morning everything’s gone crystal. It’s melting already. But before it all drips away…


These are all cherry tree branches.





In three months-pink flowers.

Zero Dark January.

1-15-13 SHORT HILLS: It remains overcast, but not very cold. There was a shower, rain shower, last night when we came out of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’. That is a thrilling movie, even though you know what happened, it still has you on the edge of your seat. Jessica Chastain deserved her Golden Globe for best actress, and Kathryn Bigelow’s direction is superb. We’re off to VT for a long weekend.

January in NJ usually looks like this.

The other morning the sun broke out for a few minutes, lighting up drops of condensation on all the branches. It was like Xmas lights for a moment of two, but I couldn't really catch the image.

More Thaw.

1-12-13 SHORT HILLS: The January thaw continues, all the snow is gone, the top layer of the soil has turned to mud making the yard treacherous for walking. The days have been dark, drizzly and dreary. Everything is wet, but there hasn’t been much rain accumulation. Tomorrow is supposed to be in the sixties.

2012 was the warmest year on record, beating out the previous record, 1998, I think, by a whole degree, which is a big increase.

There is a Op-Ed piece by Dan Fagin in today’s NYT about carcinogenic industrial wastes contaminating drinking water now happening in China, and echoing previous similar practices in Europe and then America. It’s titled, ‘A Cancer Cycle from Here to China’.

January Thaw.

1-8-13 SHORT HILLS: We have survived the new year celebrations, the trip back to NJ, an unpleasant URI, the fiscal cliff, the beginning of January and my wonderful Birthday Party at Val’s in Brooklyn, given by Valerie’s and Alison’s families. The guests came from the far ends of the country. Most people had no trouble finding her co-op.

Judy made a beautiful speech, the kids and grands were funny and I did a Top Ten. I won’t repeat anything that was said and I seem to forgotten the number.

Here in NJ we have thin snow cover that is fast disappearing in a week-long January thaw. On the weather maps, it looks like the whole country is getting a thaw.


Val, Judy, me, Alison, Anna.
Lucy, Maggie, Lily.

Hello, 2013.

12-31-12 VERMONT: It’s another overcast day. The sky was clear last night, giving us a lot of moonlight, but it looks like more snow now. We did another snowshoe trek around the pasture with the dogs. Yesterday’s wind as created snowdrifts on all the downwind slopes that are quite deep.

It has been a succession of dinners out for us. We been at Ken and Jane’s, Steve and Diana’s, Donna and Bruce’s and tonight we do New Years Eve at Stone Soup, maybe we’ll be awake at twelve, but probably not.

Happy, Happy everyone.


Have a seat!

More Snow, More Geology.

12-29-12 VERMONT: More snow today, at least six inches since mid-morning, with a few hours to go. It’s in the low twenties, but there’s no wind, so today’s snowshoeing was comfortable. Everything is white, and the snow is piled up on every surface.


Snowy Woods.

Whiteout-another six inches, so far.

Back to the pond ice—notice in yesterday’s pix the close up of the uplifted part of the ‘island’ that there is a crack through the middle perpendicular to the edge. When that small section of ice was bowed upwards it cracked because it can’t stretch or bend.

Now, if you will, think of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, actually paired ocean-bottom mountain ranges located mid way between the Americas and Europe and Africa, extending almost from one pole to the other. The ridges are sliced by transform faults that cross the ridges at right angles to the segment of the ridge they intersect. [Wikipedia has nice articles on both the ridges and transform faults, and Google Earth shows them both.] If you visualize the ridges from the side running from pole to pole, it is obviously a long arc, not a flat line as it might seem when looking downwards at it, because the earth is a sphere. As the ridges are pushed upward and away from each other by the magma upwelling between the two ridges, the ridges, being solidified rock, are unable to stretch under this upward force and crack, forming the transform faults. As the ocean bottom is carried away from the spreading center these cracks are propagated and lengthened and extended. The ice demonstrates a mini-example of the formation of a transform fault.

Pond Tectonics.

12-28-12 VERMONT: The neighbors arrived yesterday morning to clear the pond again, but were confronted by eight inches of snow, a much more formidable job than the previous day’s work of three inches. We all decided that it would be easier not to clear the entire pond but create a track around the outside by shoveling some snow inwards and some outwards, leaving a mound in the middle and a track around the mound. They had drilled into the ice a few days before this and the thickness was three inches which is OK, but not optimal for a lot of activity.

When they were almost finished, the weight of the snow mountain in the center caused the ice around it to crack, leaving a central ‘island’ which partially sank on one side. Six cracks spread radially outward from the island quite symmetrically. Everyone fled the ice.

Greenish pond water overspread the half of the island that was depressed until it reached its buoyancy point. One small section of the island, that was not awash, actually popped upward along the fracture line and then cracked perpendicularly to the fracture.


The weight of the piled snow in the center of the pond caused a central island to crack and detach from the ice plate and send out radial fractures.


The far side of the central island sank because of its weight allowing the greenish pond water to flood onto the surface soaking and melting some of the snow mound. It stopped sinking when the buoyancy point was reached. On the near side of the island, a small segment of the ice was uplifted has a crack perpendicular to the uplifted margin.

Close up photo of the uplifted segment, with a 'transform fault'.

I couldn’t help but think of analogies to Plate Tectonics. The first one that came to mind was the depression of continental plates by glacial ice allowing the ocean to flood the land. An example of this happening occurred during the melt down after the recent ice age. Huge lakes formed as ice melted but the water remained trapped behind dams of ice and morainal debris. One such lake was Lake Vermont filling the present Lake Champlain and much more of western Vermont. When the dam broke, the fresh, melt water from the lake drained out the present St. Lawrence valley, but because the weight of the ice had depressed the continental plate, which rebounds very slowly, the ocean water back filled the valley creating the Champlain Sea. Whale fossils have been found in the present Lake Champlain region. When the continental plate did ultimately rebound, the sea water drained and was replaced by fresh melt water.

More examples after I do a bit of research.