The sound of a frozen lake: other-worldly, and twangy
January 22, 2018 8:59 AM   Subscribe

 
My parents moved across the street from a largish lake a decade or so ago. It was a great surprise to me how much noise frozen lakes and trees actually make. This is awesome, thanks!
posted by nevercalm at 9:13 AM on January 22, 2018


I bought a very old book at a local library sale years and years ago (Harold Wentworth. American Dialect Dictionary. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1944.) that I've recently been looking through, which includes this entry, which I share on the grounds that it's related to frozen lakes and MeFi is the only place I know that would appreciate this sort of thing:
tickly-benders, tittly-benders, kittly-benders, bender, bendabow, bendy, &c., n. pl. Thin ice, as on a pool, that bends under one's weight, as in skating, but holds; the act of walking on such ice. Cf. rubber ice.

1845 e.Mass. Let us not play at kittlybenders. H. D. Thoreau Walden. 1890 Mass. tittlybenders |tItli bɛndəz| = sallies out on thin ice. 'He cuts a tittly bender.' Possibly applied to the ice itself. 1890 Mass. Barnstable |tIkl-I (3 syls.) bɛndə|. Let's make it tickly-bender. Before 1892 e.Mass. Wellesley |tItl-I bɛndəz| or |-doz|. Applied to the ice itself. 'Running benders' was a common phr. 1893 N.J. tick(e)ly, or ticklish, bender = running on yielding ice. Also bender. 1896 N.H. bend-a-bow. 1896 Conn. bendy. 1915 cent.N.Y. Cortland None of these wds. known. Such ice is called 'rubber ice.' 1934 kittlybenders, kitl- colloq. U.S.; tickly-benders standard use. Web.
I'm charmed both by the thought that this was a common enough activity to warrant a special term for, and by the term itself. Particularly the kittly variant.
posted by Spathe Cadet at 9:50 AM on January 22, 2018 [8 favorites]


I live across the street from a small lake. If you go out on the ice at night, as the temperature changes, the ice makes these eerie booming sounds.
posted by theora55 at 10:24 AM on January 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


This sounds so cool (pun definitely intended)
posted by sleeping bear at 10:39 AM on January 22, 2018


I took my dogs on a long walk Friday, the first day above freezing in a couple weeks. The lake in the nearby park was frozen over at the end opposite the fountain.

I considered taking them out on the ice - you could see it was 6" thick - but the "dweeeik! dweik" of cracks propagating set me off that notion *real* quick.

(...and then I realized I'd let the flop-eared assholes right to an immense field of goose poop, their favorite delicacy. Ugh.)
posted by notsnot at 11:27 AM on January 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


And if I listen very, veery carefully, I can make out the whisper...ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.
posted by howfar at 11:28 AM on January 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


A little louder than a whisper I think.
posted by JoJoPotato at 1:45 PM on January 22, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yes, people in Maine find ways to be entertained during the long winter.
posted by theora55 at 5:42 PM on January 22, 2018 [3 favorites]


We lived on the edge of a wood when I was a kid (literally, as where our backyard ended the woods began). It was a bird sanctuary, so fairly untouched, and a wonderful place to play for us kids. There was a stream not far into the woods, which wound through the sanctuary for quite a distance. One frosty winter day when I was 8 or 9 I went out early by myself to the stream to find it had skinned over with clear ice overnight, with the water still flowing underneath. I was wearing waterproof boots, so I just started walking upstream on the ice and breaking it as I went. The only sound was the carick-carick-carick of the ice as it began to splinter into lines and then broke under foot, and some faint water sounds below. I could feel the shock of the coolness of the water flowing around my boots as each step broke through. It seemed like the whole world was catching its breath. It was magical.
posted by gudrun at 7:07 PM on January 22, 2018 [4 favorites]


It doesn't freeze where I grew up, but one day when I was living in the UK as an adult I absently skipped a stone across a frozen ornamental lake.
I nearly fell over in surprise at the sound, and spent the rest of my lunch hour making funny noises with rocks.
posted by bystander at 11:13 PM on January 22, 2018 [3 favorites]


I get the downward peeow sound, but how is it making the upward bweepbweepbweep? At -1:07 on the Gun Lake video are some of what I mean.

The downward frequency sweep is because ice has stiffness, i.e. it's unhappier the more tightly curved it is. So waves that are made of more curvature -- high frequencies -- get shoved along faster. From a far-away impulse, the highs reach me first, then the lows trailing behind. (But I've never worked this out quantitatively... I wonder if the amount pans out.)

But what's that upward sweep? Wildly speculating, an effect where the lower frequencies don't see the roughness of the lake edge, so they reflect more directly while the higher frequencies scatter and arrive by more hops?

... I love lake ice sounds. My brothers and I spent a cold hour hucking rocks almost straight to get a nice single strike and hear the echoing and reverberative fade.
posted by away for regrooving at 1:21 AM on January 24, 2018


« Older The thin green line   |   "Why? Just because it looks nice." Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments