Strange that we live in a world where people who see a nearby house getting slowly ransacked by ever-moving ice floe go first to videotape the event on their cell phones before working a bit harder to alert the authorities. It's the digital age, though, and one rife with natural disasters that might very well be a symptom of climate change that is slowly changing everything about our planet, especially ice.
Although there have yet to be any injuries reported (as of Monday, May 13), massive sheets of ice, as part of an "ice tsunami," have been damaging residences in northern Minnesota and Canada. Hailing from homes in northern Minnesota's Izatys Resort, we can see video footage of the peculiar weather effect closing in on one house in particular.
The video of the ice tsunami not only shows us what it's like to have one's house slowly "attacked" by creeping, ever-advancing ice. We can also literally hear the ice growing, moving and encroaching upon the house with an eerie popping noise that leaves one thinking the ice is all but alive.
"National Weather Service Meteorologist Shawn Devinny said 30 to 40 mile an hour winds pushed the water into the ice, driving it ashore," ABC News relayed in its report on the natural occurrence and video.
"He says the winds were lighter Sunday and the shoreline got a reprieve."
10 miles of the shoreline are covered in ice that is reaching as high as 30 feet tall, according to Department of Natural Resources.
As many as 30 homes in Manitoba were damaged or destroyed by a similar ice tsunami phenomenon, according to the Winnipeg Free Press in a report on Saturday, May 11.
"Hundreds of local residents arrived by the dozens on Saturday with backhoes and bulldozers and wheelbarrows -- helping to chip away massive ice floes that on Friday night destroyed 12 homes and damaged another 15 along Ochre Beach, located 20 kilometres east of Dauphin," the Winnipeg Free Press said.
"They [the homeowners] heard it before they saw it [the ice] coming up their decks," Clayton Watts, the deputy reeve of the rural municipality of Ochre River, said. "Then it came right in their front windows. It was just a matter of minutes. Fortunately, no one was hurt. We were very lucky."
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