Wintry Sunrise from Pictured Rocks, photo by Lake Superior Photo

Normally ice would be gone or nearly gone from Superior and the other Great Lakes, but as the Freep reported:

Heading into May, the Great Lakes combined remain 26% ice-covered, with Lake Superior still more than half-blanketed in ice. By comparison, at this time last spring the lakes were less than 2% covered with ice.

The remaining levels of ice cover are amazing, said Jia Wang, an ice climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Ann Arbor.

“This prolonged winter will affect summer temperatures. This summer will be cold, and then a cooler fall,” he said.

In addition to wreaking havoc on the Great Lakes shipping industry and impacting fish and other aquatic species, the miles of ice cover serve as a vast, white reflector.

“All that sunlight that would normally heat up the water is just bouncing back up into space,” said Jay Austin, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth’s Large Lakes Observatory, who agrees with Wang about the ice cover’s impacts on this summer, but disagrees about its potential impacts on weather beyond that.

Read on for more. About the photo, Shawn of Lake Superior photo writes:

A wonderful wintry sunrise from Pictured Rocks this morning…. ok I’m going to go cry now

The lake was still (of course, with ice that’s feet thick as far as the eye can see..) but a new sound, you could hear the waterfalls, prob Miners Falls in the distance.. so cool

View Shawn’s photo big as our biggest lake on Facebook, see another shot of the wintry expanse from Miner’s Castle and definitely follow her photos as “spring” unfolds in the North Country at the Lake Superior Photo Facebook along with 30,000+ others and purchase photos at lakesuperiorphoto.com!