Ice Dams

Following a week of virtually non-stop food and festivity, I spent a good part of the day yesterday on a ladder chipping ice off the eaves to stop the flow of water into the house. There's something meditative about following the cleavages in the ice with a hammer and screwdriver, watching the chunks fly off through your yellow-tinted goggles, seeing how close you can get to the shingles without punching a hole in them. The little tap-tap-tap rings out through the neighborhood, while the incessant drip-drip-drip continues inside.

The ice itself has the look of white obsidian, wavy, smooth, and sheer. The task is seemingly endless, but it’s a thrill when you do hit an area where a puddle has collected; the ice is suddenly wet, it starts to come off easier, your deerskin choppers soon become soaked. Time to come in for another cup of coffee...

So much for global warming? Not really. It’s well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, but there are exceptions. The seasonal snow cover has, in the past two decades, actually expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially just north of the Himalayas, the Tien Shan, and the Altai in Central Asia. This pile of snow influences the atmosphere profoundly because it creates a large dome of cold air which the jet stream must bend around. A bigger pile of cold air generates a bigger bend. In response, the jet stream diverges more often, and more wildly, from its generally west to east path and begins to meander north and south, sending more warm air north from the tropics into Alaska and Greenland, and pushing cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies across the interior of North America. Cold Siberian air, meanwhile, spills south into East Asia and southwestward toward Europe.

More snow, more ice dams. I’ve got the bamboo roof-rake out. There’s something poetic about scraping snow with bamboo, I guess. Yet the effort is half-hearted. It’s supposed to rain in a day or two…