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Seeing the Invisible Present and Place: From Years to Centuries with Lake Ice from Wisconsin to the Northern Hemisphere

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The Challenges of Long Term Ecological Research: A Historical Analysis

Part of the book series: Archimedes ((ARIM,volume 59))

Abstract

Ecologists involved in long-term research created the metaphors of the “Invisible Present” and the “Invisible Place” to communicate the purposes of Long-Term Ecological Research to the National Science Foundation, other scientists, and the wider public. This chapter discusses using lake ice cover to tackle the joint problems of the Invisible Present and the Invisible Place, by expanding the time and space scales not only at the North Temperate Lakes Long-Term Ecological Research site, but across Wisconsin, North America, and the Northern Hemisphere. LTER formed an international Lake Ice Analysis Group in the mid-1990s, to create and make publicly available a common lake ice phenology database. By 2000, analyses of ice cover provided strong evidence for warming winters in the Northern Hemisphere, and for the impact of the Second Industrial Revolution on climate. Importantly, for ice freeze time series, 20 and 50 years of data were insufficient to detect climate change while longer records did; large-scale climate drivers like El Niño, the North Atlantic Oscillation, as well as local weather influenced inter-year dynamics of lake ice seasonality; inter-year dynamics between lakes were coherent locally and persisted regionally at lower values; extreme ice dates changed in the direction of a warming climate; and changes in lake ice already have affected people negatively. Research on inland water ice and winter limnology continues today and has depended on successes in continuing leadership and participation within and beyond the LTER program.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    While Senge was writing about complex human systems, I think the same could be said of complex ecological systems.

  2. 2.

    Birge’ essay, “A House Half Built”, was an address before the Madison Literary Club, October 12, 1936. In Edward A. Birge Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin.

  3. 3.

    The first LTER grant to the Center for Limnology from NSF’s Division of Environmental Biology was DEB-8012313 (1980–1986).

  4. 4.

    The record likely originated because the local citizenry used the ice for their kitchen ice-boxes, and also for easier travel than the overland trails and wagon routes over land over the wetland-rich region.

  5. 5.

    At the time I was unaware of an equally striking, but shorter, time series in the freezing and breakup of Lake Kallavesi in Finland (Simojoki 1961) from winters 1883–84 to 1957–58. Warming trends after about 1880 and oscillatory dynamics were apparent.

  6. 6.

    Published on behalf of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE) of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU).

  7. 7.

    The augmentation from NSF Division of Environmental Biology was added to Grant DEB-9011660 to the Center for Limnology.

  8. 8.

    “Global Lake and River Ice Phenology Database,” https://nsidc.org/data/g01377. Updated in 2012. “The Global Lake and River Ice Phenology Database contains freeze and thaw/breakup dates as well as other descriptive ice cover data for 865 lakes and rivers in the Northern Hemisphere. Of the 542 water bodies that have records longer than 19 years, 370 are in North America and 172 are in Eurasia. 249 lakes and rivers have records longer than 50 years, and 66 have records longer than 100 years. A few water bodies have data available prior to 1845.” B. J. Benson led the management of the LIAG database.

  9. 9.

    This compares with the p = 0.05 in Robertson’s research about 10 years earlier on lake ice duration (Robertson 1989).

  10. 10.

    Google scholar had recorded 1082 citations by June 2019.

  11. 11.

    Sapna is now at York University in Toronto where she has become a leader in lake-ice research; I settled happily into the roles of advisor, historian, advocate, critic, and coauthor. I retired in 2000 but continued to be an active researcher at the Center for Limnology, UW–Madison, as an Emeritus Professor.

  12. 12.

    Daily weather data did not exist for these lakes for 150 years.

  13. 13.

    https://blog.nationalgeographic.org/2016/04/26/lake-suwas-shinto-legend

  14. 14.

    A University of Wisconsin -Madison graduate student (Masami Nii Glines) and a news reporter in Suwa (Asuka Momose) worked us through those challenges through a series of phone calls and emails.

  15. 15.

    Only the Great Lakes had been included.

  16. 16.

    http://gleon.org; https://lter.limnology.wisc.edu/project/global-lakes-ecological-observatory-network-gleon

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Acknowledgements

I thank the National Science Foundation for supporting the North Temperate Lakes LTER program and special competitions for inter-site projects and workshops from the early 1980s to 2019. The NTL LTER program supported final figure preparation. I recognize the investments of time and talents and data from participants in the Lake Ice Analysis Group and the many other colleagues and students at Wisconsin and around the Northern Hemisphere. I appreciate reviews of the manuscript and suggestions received from Sharon Kingsland, Robert Waide, Sapna Sharma, Emily Stanley, Hilary Dugan, and Curt Meine.

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  1. Center for Limnology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    John J. Magnuson

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Correspondence to John J. Magnuson .

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  1. Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Robert B. Waide

  2. Department of History of Science and Technology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Sharon E. Kingsland

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Magnuson, J.J. (2021). Seeing the Invisible Present and Place: From Years to Centuries with Lake Ice from Wisconsin to the Northern Hemisphere. In: Waide, R.B., Kingsland, S.E. (eds) The Challenges of Long Term Ecological Research: A Historical Analysis. Archimedes, vol 59. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66933-1_9

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