Ice Tsunami
The '
Ice Tsunami' is the most beautiful disaster I've never heard of.
The Great White North was pelted by 'ice tsunamis' over the weekend: walls of ice forming on the Great Lakes were pushed inland, destroying a couple dozen homes in Manitoba. No one was harmed, but 27 houses were completely crushed.
Last Friday, ice floes on the surface of Dauphin Lake in
Manitoba, Canada, were pushed ashore by high winds. Once on land, the
ice tsunami – as witnesses have dubbed it – rose to around 9 metres high in places as more and more ice was blown in behind it. It destroyed six homes – one is pictured above – and damaged 14 others in Ochre River, a lakeside town that had only just recovered from severe floods in 2011.
A tsunami-like wave of ice called an ice heave destroyed a dozen two-story homes in Minnesota. The Great White North was pelted by 'ice tsunamis' over the weekend: walls of ice forming on the Great Lakes were pushed inland, destroying a couple dozen homes in Manitoba. No one was harmed, but 27 houses were completely crushed.
The same phenomenon hit Mille Lacs Lake in Minnesota the next day. Locals say nothing like it has been seen since the 1950s. As one person who lost their home described it: "You know you've got cement, concrete blocks and steel, and the ice goes through it like it's just a toothpick."
According to local meteorologists, the wave was caused by 60-kilometre-an-hour winds pushing large chunks of ice towards the shore, where they meet smaller pieces that have started to melt. These help the momentum of the ice sheet overcome the friction of the land, which it mounts – slowly taking out everything in its path.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23551-ice-tsunamis-overwhelm-lakeside-homes.html
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Topic: Ice Tsunami (Read 3862 times)