The time honored Canadian pastime of strolling on the beach in winter (with swim suit and snow boots). Photo by Jody Moon.
We were in Grand Bend (Ontario, Canada) on the weekend. This is a small resort town on Lake Huron about an hour from our place. The town hit American radar last year as the location of that Mitt Romney guy’s family cottage — the place he was heading when the dog carrier was infamously strapped to the roof of the car. Anyway, we usually visit “The Bend” in the summer, but a hockey tournament had us visiting my brother and his family at a hotel just a few hundred feet from the beach. It was unseasonably warm (well above freezing) and sunny, so we decided to troop on down to the beach en mass and check it out. The beachscape was not what I was expecting. Yes, there was a wide strip of frozen sand mixed together with snow and another strip of bare sand, but the positions of the two relative to the lake were the opposite of what I’d expected.
Lake Huron isn’t frozen and there was plenty of wave action. What I expected to see was a strip of bare sand leading up to the edge of the lake. The waves would have washed away any snow accumulation leaving bare sand. The bulk of the beach (basically extending from the far limit of the wave action to the grasses) is where I was expecting to see the snow. Basically like this. Instead, the sand all along the water’s edge was snow encrusted and white, while there was a clear delineation where the snow then disappeared, with no trace of white extending all the way back to the grass. Huh.
The dividing lines between water, frozen sand/ice/snow matrix and regular beach sand. Photo by Jody Moon
You can see the transition pretty clearly in this shot. I’ve been scratching my head, trying to understand why this would be (it’s a Sunday at time of writing, I had a late night, the kids are cleaning their rooms and I have time for deep thoughts like this). I couldn’t find anything online that explained the effect and pretty much every snowy beach photo that Google spit out showed the expected water, sand, snow progression. So what’s going on here?
One possibility: So many people have been out walking the beach that they’ve broken down the snow/sand matrix. This would assume that doing so would cause the ice crystals to melt (leaving pristine sand) and that beach walkers were following a fairly clearly defined route that spread out across the entire width of the beach, while avoiding stepping within twenty feet or so of the water’s edge. That seemed unlikely. The sand is quite dry once you got away from the water and although there were footprints and we saw a few other people, the beach was far from crawling. Also, the people we saw weren’t obviously avoiding the water’s edge.
Maybe there has been little or no snowfall yet this winter and the white accumulation at the water’s edge is frozen spray from the waves mixed together with sand. Not snow. The rest of the beach is bare because there was little or no snow cover to begin with.
I dug around a bit into weather stats for the area (it was that or go pick up the dog poop that’s appeared in the back yard as the snow melts) and found the average snowfall for December in Grand Bend is 16.4 inches. It usually gets about the same in January. A quick check of precipitation since December 1 2012 shows less than three inches, some of which fell as rain. The Bend is having a pretty dry, snow-free winter so far. So the second theory seems the most likely to me, but if anyone — any meteorologists or climatologists — knows for sure, now it’s bugging me.
