11-05-2019, 02:37 PM
Craig, it's got some good points but it also really misses the boat on some of those question and answers... I don't think they grasp what was being asked when they talk about the water level dropping and the ice not touching the water level. They say it's safe, but I wouldn't trust that situation at all... Scary stuff... Heard of one time when the water level on Porcupine had been dropped during the winter and an ice sheet left a suspended slab about 10 feet above the water level so you had ice about 10' of air and then the water underneath that. Nothing more scary than drilling a hole and no water coming up in your hole... Can you imagine what would happen if that ice started cracking and dropped you through... Man they can't make horror stories that scary in my book... and without the water floating the ice it has totally different mechanical properties and becomes much weaker I suspect as the compression on the top surface and tension on the bottom surface layer instead of a more even stress level through out the layers... Ice is more a compressive strength and when you put it in tensile, it just doesn't do well... However, if it supports the big heavy ice sheet, your weight probably doesn't make a lot of difference, but there's no way in heck I'd get on it... unless I didn't know, and when I found out I'd race off of there carefully...
Back east where the wiki answers were given they probably don't have situations where the suspended slabs can occur like we do out here with our reservoirs.. and it is rare when it happens out here too, but still scares me to think of it... Later Jeff
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Back east where the wiki answers were given they probably don't have situations where the suspended slabs can occur like we do out here with our reservoirs.. and it is rare when it happens out here too, but still scares me to think of it... Later Jeff
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