March 11, 2026

Ice shove on Lake Mendota.

This morning at sunrise:


The word we were trying to remember is "seiche," but my research after the fact makes me think this was mostly the wind and not the sloshing seiche. 

Here's Meade's video of the invisible sunrise and me fulfilling the ritual of taking a picture of it:

17 comments:

Dave Begley said...

Ann:

What happened to your fur coat and hat?

Christopher B said...

I've seen "seiche" used in a bunch of metrological posts on FB to describe strong wind driving water away from shallow areas on the Great Lakes but from your link that seems to be an appropriation of the word to describe a similar but more noticeable event.

Iman said...

Ice on Mendota
Fire in the place

Aggie said...

Oh dear..... Althouse has allowed her video to be sullied by the vision of a young man in shorts.

Oh, the humanity.

Quaestor said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Quaestor said...

Tourists at Loch Ness often get seiches and plesiosaurs confused.

RCOCEAN II said...

What friendly people. Loved the young guy in shorts, when it was what 30 degrees?

Howard said...

Ice tectonics

Lem Vibe Bandit said...

Ice TikTonics

JK Brown said...

It's just wind-driven water, but frozen instead of liquid. The solid phase of the water prevents the piled up water from flowing back down the beach slope as "undertow" or along the beach until it reaches a drain opening in the shallow offshore bank, i.e., rip tide.

Closest liquid state phenomena would be surge, when wind-driven water is pushed ashore before it can drain away

Quaestor said...

"It's just wind-driven water..."

Or it's aliens. (One must feed their conspiracy theories or a Democrat will throw a bomb at you.)

Rocco said...

Iman said...
Ice on Mendota
Fire in the place


We all came out to Mad’son
On the Lake Woebegone shore
To make videos with a mobile
Meade didn't have much time
But Iman and the Posters
Were at the best blog around
But some stupid with a seiche
Blew the place to the ground

[Chorus]
Ice on Mendota
And fire in the place
Ice on Mendota

Marcus Bressler said...

Leave it to the wordsmith to use the perfect word choice here with "ice shove". Bravo! (I only knew of it from reading accounts of the trips of explorers to the Arctic and Antarctic)

Ann Althouse said...

Ice shove is the technical term. I wasn’t making it up.

Marcus Bressler said...

I wasn’t suggesting that you made it up. I complimented you on using the correct technical word.

Iman said...

You got it, Rocco. Excellent!

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