Our family and friends just went skating on a big, shallow pond here in town. The ice was as smooth and flat as “wild ice” ever gets; practically a rink. Every time we go there, I’m amazed at the variety of ice that forms.

I didn’t take a camera, so I don’t have a picture, but today was particularly astonishing: About 80 percent of the pond was white, as ice often is from bubbles, but the rest was jet black, meaning it was very clear ice - mostly in a very specific area. The border between white and black was as sharp as it could be. We had a dog along, and as it first it refused to cross the line, since the black ice looked like water.

I assume the black are was open water until the extreme cold hit a few days ago, and that it froze so fast not many bubbles were formed. But that’s just a guess.

Several years ago we went and the ice was so clear that you could look through it and see bugs crawling around, upside-down on the underside.

(We also found a frozen fish on top of the ice, that had been left by an ice fisherman. We had some ice hockey sticks, so we used it to play human croquet. In case you were wondering, it’s hard to direct a frozen perch through the legs of a friend standing 100 feet away.)

Tags: ice;frozen