By Wendy Elliott
There are ice cakes, ice floes and icebergs. January’s cold spell appeared to create two differently-shaped ice cakes locally.
In Wolfville harbour, the ice cakes are squared off, but, closer to the Gladys Porter bridge, they had a rounded shape.
Biologist Sherman Bleakney, who is an expert on the eastern Kings dykes, said he’d viewed the rounded ice some years before in a pool below the White Rock canal dam.
He said that back eddies can rotate ice blocks as they form.
“So I guess that somewhere along the Cornwallis River course, there must be eddy sites that grind down any asymmetrical ice blocks to a rounded configuration.”
The blocks in Wolfville harbour are in a dead end pocket and may spend more time going up and down, rather than round and round, Bleakney noted.
The Canadian Coast Guard uses internationally-accepted terminology for ice forms and conditions. Coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization, they include terms more commonly used in the Arctic, like frazil ice, grease ice and brash ice.
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