Icicles abound!

What: Winter always makes me remember how I forget about the winter when it's summer. It's hard reconciling the stunted, gnarled growth of the silver maples and white cedars that grow along the edge while sitting on the shore, my feet gently washed by the warm waters lapping up under a lazy summer sun.

But being out during the winter, when spray whipped against the low hanging leaves and branches and supersatured "foggy" air right above the lake freezes into tight icicles, gives clue as to the real limiting factors for planst growing next to the edge. The sacrifice for all that sun is a 2" rind of ice that snaps branches and scouring icy winds that peel away bark.

Icicles were also abundant on the underside of overhangs. The icicles below had formed on a rock that was about 10' off the shore. I assume they formed as snow melted from above and froze as it dripped off the rock (and out of the sun). Supersaturated air condensed onto the little icicles forming the weird lichen-like flakes clinging to the sides (a secondary feature).

Also of note was the stalagtites on the underbelly of the overthrust. The chunky yellowish rock is the much older Dunham dolostone perched atop the scraggly charcoal-colored Iberville Shale. Both weather pretty easily, but the dolostone, a lightly metamorphosed and then aged limestone, is filled with lots of cracks. Because it's a limestone (made of calcium carbonates), it weathers rather easily under the acidity of rain (if you drop hydrochloric acid on a freshly cut surface it will fizz as the acid reacts with calcium carbonate and releases carbon dioxide). In this section, the deep groves in the rock have been exaggerated by acidity over time and the icicles are forming under one of these fissures.

Along the edge of the cliffs the fissures become breaking points where larger rocks fracture off the cliff and plunge into the water. A dramatic event, to be sure, as the more crumbly shale beneath erodes faster, so the dolostone plummets rather than roles to its resting place in the lake. The picture also shows pretty straight geometric lines. The fractures are older than the erosion by acidity, which just expedites the fracturing process. And in places more distant from the cliffes, the fissures form small to occasionally large caverns, called karst topography. Many of the caves in Vermont are located in these calcium-rich, or calcareous, bedrocks. 

Tree drool

What: The trees were drooling! I'll cover this later when I get some better photos of tree drool, but in short, the appearance of pools of white foam/bubbles at the base of trees during rainstorms is connected to stemflow (the amount of water that flows down a trees trunk, rather than falling directly to the ground). As rain washes down the surface of a tree, it picks up lots of stuff (minerals, pollen, spores, dead bug parts, etc) that dissolve into the flowing water. Somehow this decreases the surface tension of the water allowing the water to more readily bubble. I'm not so satisfied with this explanation (surprisingly little is known about tree drool) and will look into it more...

I did notice that the bubbles have an oily irridescence and seemed to pool at points where bark funneled and suddenly stopped or, as on the red maple in the photo above, where a scar or branch dripped water to a lower spot on the tree. Seemed to also be at the base of larger trees with mature bark.

Ecological notes: First soaking rain in a long while. Felt really good to be out in the woods with the fresh smell of rain washing the trees clean. The warm weather combined with the rain and everything just exploded. Things had been becoming green and now the woods has this vibrant fullness to its green.

Where: Centennial Woods

Other notes: First kingfisher in Centennial Woods in 2 years. Beavers are going to town on the hemlocks - probably not much longer for CW.