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  • Review Article
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Lake ice quality in a warming world

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 5, pages 671–685 (2024)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 30 September 2024

This article has been updated

Abstract

Ice phenology has shifted with anthropogenic warming such that many lakes are experiencing a shorter ice season. However, changes to ice quality — the ratio of black and white ice layers — remain little explored, despite relevance to lake physics, ecological function, human recreation and transportation. In this Review, we outline how ice quality is changing and discuss knock-on ecosystem service impacts. Although direct evidence is sparse, there are suggestions that ice quality is diminishing across the Northern Hemisphere, encompassing declining ice thickness, decreasing black ice and increasing white ice. These changes are projected to continue in the future, scaling with global temperature increases, and driving considerable impacts to related ecosystem services. Rising proportions of white ice will markedly reduce bearing strength, implying more dangerous conditions for transportation (limiting operational use of many winter roads) and recreation (increasing the risk of fatal spring-time drownings). Shifts from black to white ice conditions will further reduce the amount of light reaching the water column, minimizing primary production, and altering community composition to favour motile and mixotrophic species; these changes will affect higher trophic levels, including diminished food quantity for zooplankton and fish, with potential developmental consequences. Reliable and translatable in situ sampling methods to assess and predict spatiotemporal variations in ice quality are urgently needed.

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Fig. 1: Impacts on ice quality in a warming climate.
Fig. 2: Ice quality observations and trends.
Fig. 3: Projected changes to ice thickness as a proxy for ice quality.
Fig. 4: Evolving allowable load.
Fig. 5: Drownings through lake ice collapse.
Fig. 6: Snow cover impacts on lake primary production.

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Change history

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network (GLEON) for initial conversation and feedback on the conceptual ideas from which this manuscript benefited. Funding for this work was provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery Grant, York University Research Chair Programme, and ArcticNet, a Network for Centres of Excellence Canada, to S.S. G.A.W. and E.J. acknowledge funding from the Swedish Research Council (grant no. 2020-03222) and the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences, and Spatial Planning (FORMAS, grant no. 2020-01091). S.H. was supported by the National Science Foundation DEB (grant no. 2306886). R.I.W. was supported by a UKRI Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Independent Research Fellowship (grant no. NE/T011246/1) and a NERC grant (reference no. NE/X019071/1), ‘UK EO Climate Information Service’. The authors would also like to thank M. Pulkkanen for assistance in navigating the Finnish Environmental Institute database. They also thank M. Magee and G. Gunn for critical feedback.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Joshua Culpepper, Kirill Shchapov & Sapna Sharma

  2. Department of Ecology and Genetics/Limnology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

    Ellinor Jakobsson & Gesa A. Weyhenmeyer

  3. Biosphere Sciences and Engineering, Carnegie Institution for Science, Pasadena, CA, USA

    Stephanie E. Hampton

  4. Centro Ricerca e Innovazione, Fondazione Edmund Mach, San Michele all’Adige, Italy

    Ulrike Obertegger

  5. River and Lake Ecology, Cawthorn Institute, Nelson, New Zealand

    Kirill Shchapov

  6. School of Ocean Sciences, Bangor University, Bangor, UK

    R. Iestyn Woolway

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Culpepper, J., Jakobsson, E., Weyhenmeyer, G.A. et al. Lake ice quality in a warming world. Nat Rev Earth Environ 5, 671–685 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-024-00590-6

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