The winter that wasn’t

My phone buzzed as I was walking out the door, and an alert about dangerous driving popped on the screen: black ice caused by an unusual “freezing fog.”

Having totaled my car about 10 years ago on River Road due to black ice, it got my attention. And yes, as I looked up from the screen, wreathes of fog were swirling amongst the branches of the great sycamores that tower over our house. But as I pulled out onto that Lenni Lenape walking trail that became a stagecoach route that became River Road, everything: the trees, shrubs, grasses, houses and cars were encrusted with an ephemeral coating of rime ice, glittering in the morning sun, accentuating every branch and feature of the landscape, so that the entire countryside became a jeweled work of art.

In this winter that was no winter, it was a delightful reminder of the season and its beauty, and a great lesson in the fascinating caprices of nature that give rise to so much beauty.

Freezing fogvis created by supercooled water droplets, that is, water droplets that are colder than freezing, but remain liquid. Impossible you say? No. The world is not so simple, so black and white.

Most high-level stratus and cumulus clouds are composed of such droplets. Ice is a crystalline form of water, and needs a seed crystal, usually a dissolved mineral, to begin the crystallization process. Absent that, the water can cool below freezing without the molecules linking up in a lattice, like Tinker Toys, turning it into a crystal, a solid. In some sense, it is the purity of the water that allows for this enchantment.

This phenomenon usually occurs on clear, cold winter nights, when the heat that the Earth absorbed during the day is radiated back into space. This results in a reduction of the air’s ability to hold moisture which allows water vapor to condense into tiny water droplets eventually leading to the formation of fog. With everything solid cooled to below freezing, these droplets crystallize on contact, creating the delicate beauty of rime.

While skating on a shallow pond with friends during the bitter cold weekend before Christmas, we watched with delight a couple of good-sized snapping turtles traipsing lazily across the bottom, clouds of mud blooming behind them beneath the ice. The 7-year-old with us stopped us all in our tracks: “How does he breathe?” We were all stumped. How did they manage?

We whipped out our phones and quickly learned that turtles are uniquely adapted to such conditions. As cold-blooded reptiles, turtles’ body temperature tracks that of the environment they live in. The turtles have a trick up their sleeve. As their body cools down, their metabolism slows, meaning they need less energy, less food, less oxygen. And, they have the ability to uptake oxygen from the water through parts of their body that are very vascular, i.e. their butts.

Yes, turtles can breathe beneath the ice, with their butts. Will miracles never cease? The proper, scientific term for this miraculous butt-breathing is cloacal respiration. All freshwater turtles have this ability. But that’s not the end of their wild cards. As winter progresses, and that lid of ice prevents the water from acquiring oxygen, while the fish and turtles consume it, however slowly, the water, or mud beneath it where many turtles hibernate, becomes depleted (hypoxic) or completely bereft of oxygen (anoxic).

But still, the turtles persevere. This is because turtles can still maintain their metabolism in the absence of oxygen.

We do, too, when we are performing feats of strength or speed, maximal efforts where our muscles need intense amounts of energy, and a process known as anaerobic glycolysis provides it. But where we are able to do this for maybe minutes at a time, turtles are able to sustain this for weeks and months. They are able to access the calcium in their shells, which acts as an antacid, like taking a Tums for heartburn.

Oh this winter that is no winter still has tricks up its sleeve.

Michael Lynch lives in Upper Black Eddy.

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