Rotten Ice
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This is The Weather Notebook. You know, this time of year, ice on lakes and ponds not only melts, it rots. Ice farmer Phil Whitney explains".

Phil Whitney and Dave Thurlow

PW: "We can see it right here. So this is the top of our cake of ice, but you see this nice line right here? You can...you look at the right angle and you'll see there's a line there...

DT: Yeah, it's kind of cloudy.

PW: And then you'll get a cloudy that looks like up and down lines. And that's what it is, it's up and down lines. And that could have been nothing more than the wind was blowing before we got snow. And it put little teeny particles of dust on the ice. The dust particles heated up and started melting down through.

Now a wonderful experiment that you can do, just get a block of ice, freeze it in your freezer. Put a penny on top and set it outside in the sunshine. You see, the penny will go right straight down through the cake of ice. It's created a very, very porous hole down through it. It's just what happens early in the spring when we talk about we can't harvest anymore.

You'll look at the cake of ice out there in the water and it's just as black as it is today, looking down through it. But when you take that cake out and you set it over here....think of a honeycomb that the bees make. Fill that honeycomb full of water. The comb is the only ice, everything else in that chunk is water. And you set it out here and the ice, bingo...it's gonzo. It's just nothing but water running out of it. And so at that point of the year, you can't harvest. The only accident I had in 17 years we were trying to do one last cut too far in the season and we got honeycombed ice.

DT: So, that's kind of rotten ice.

PW: That's rotten ice, that's a good term for it, rotten ice."

Phil Whitney demonstrates the art of ice harvesting at Stonewall Farm in Keene, NH. I'm Dave Thurlow.