The ice formed completely from snow this year, as opposed to last year's 'black' ice. It was December's snows that started to freeze the lake over beginning on the 3rd. "Snow ice" is not as high quality as "Black ice" because it's flaky and has lots of air pockets in it. Then it kept snowing on top of it, and snow is actually a very good insulator so it kept the ice from attaining the quality it had last year when it froze long before we got a good dumping of snow. Daylight Saving Time won't do anything to melt it, because while DST made sunrise & sunset an hour later by our clocks, the length of time between sunrise and sunset is still the same.
IG, I wasn't sure if you were serious or just kidding around, but since a few people have asked me seriously about that in person ("will the extra hour of daylight help to melt all this snow?"), I figured I'd clarify it for anyone else who's seriously wondering. DST does the same exact thing as if we just told all the schools and workplaces to begin & end daily operations an hour earlier, but that would have a different psychological effect on us. In effect, we're going to work/school an hour earlier than we were last week but the clock change makes us rave about the 'longer' afternoon instead of complaining about having to wake up an hour earlier. The government's rationale behind the earlier DST is that afternoon daylight is more useful to us than morning daylight, so by having us do all our work an hour earlier in the day they're hoping we'll spend more time outdoors in the afternoon instead of consuming electricity indoors. Morning isn't a peak energy-usage time, but afternoon usually is.
Interestingly, the ice has made more "growth-booms" in the last couple of cold nights than I've heard all winter. Might be that the rain storm killed all the insulating fluff on top, for the first time all winter.
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