--- title: Watch the Great Lakes Freeze Over description: Beautiful time lapse imagery shows Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes freeze over during this year's brutally cold winter canonical: https://time.com/9480/great-lakes-frozen-time-lapse-video/ author: Bryan Walsh article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-02-24T03:12:58.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-21T06:28:39.043Z article:section: Science og:title: Watch the Great Lakes Freeze Over og:description: Beautiful time lapse imagery shows Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes freeze over during this year's brutally cold winter og:url: https://time.com/9480/great-lakes-frozen-time-lapse-video/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6d537667c274e03b/698682fc1eebf7107536f8c6/lake-superior-frozen.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1920 og:image:height: 1080 og:image:alt: Lake Superior Frozen og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Watch the Great Lakes Freeze Over twitter:description: Beautiful time lapse imagery shows Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes freeze over during this year's brutally cold winter twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6d537667c274e03b/698682fc1eebf7107536f8c6/lake-superior-frozen.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Watch the Great Lakes Freeze Over > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement.  by [Bryan Walsh](https://time.com/author/bryan-walsh/)  ## Bryan Walsh Feb 24, 2014 3:12 AM UTC  This satellite image from mid-February 2014 shows near-record ice cover on Lake Superior. This satellite image from mid-February 2014 shows near-record ice cover on Lake Superior. NOAA/GLERL  by [Bryan Walsh](https://time.com/author/bryan-walsh/)  ## Bryan Walsh Feb 24, 2014 3:12 AM UTC You can measure a winter in many ways: [temperature records](http://www.weau.com/weather/weathernotebook/headlines/Nearly-20-years-since-the-last-major-Arctic-blast-in-Western-Wisconsin-238684381.html), [snow cover](http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/winter-storm-aims-for-northeast-thursday/23156019), even [travel delays](http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/02/15/report-snow-ice-responsible-for-staggering-number-of-flight-cancellations/). But to truly see how frigid this winter has been—at least for the eastern half of the U.S.—you need to go way up. Satellite imagery shows that an incredible 88% of the Great Lakes—Superior, Michigan, Huron, Ontario and Erie—are now frozen over. That’s the largest ice cover the Great Lakes have experienced since 1994, and it means that there is an astounding 82,940 sq. miles (214,814 sq. km) of ice covering the biggest collection of fresh water in the world. How unusual is this? Since 1973, the average maximum ice cover extent for the Great Lakes [has been just 50%](http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=83169), and in those four decades, the ice extent has surpassed 80% just five times. (In 2002, just 9.5% of the Great Lakes froze over during the winter, the lowest extent on record, while the greatest extent was 94.7% in 1979.) And no lake is as iced over as Superior, where the extent is 95.3%. **(MORE:** [**Window on Infinity: Winter Pictures from Icy Space**](http://science.time.com/2014/02/03/window-on-infinity-winter-pictures-from-icy-space/) The unusually large extent of ice is due to a logical factor: it’s been really, really cold around the Great Lakes. In the Midwest this January, temperatures [averaged](http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2014/1) 5 to 10 F (3 to 6 C) below the 20th century average. But the endless snowfall around the Great Lakes region—Chicago, which borders Lake Michigan, experienced its third-snowiest January on record, and Detroit [had its snowiest month ever](http://detroit.cbslocal.com/2014/01/30/metro-detroit-to-set-record-for-snowiest-month-ever/)—played a role as well, insulating the ice cover when temperatures would rise. If you’re wondering why Lake Ontario has such a smaller amount of its surface [covered in ice](http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/ice/), that’s because the lake is unusually deep, which gives it a tremendous heat storage capacity. But numbers can only tell you so much. [TIME editor Jonathan Woods](http://twitter.com/jonwoods) has stitched together imagery provided by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) [Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab](http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/data/ice/) and taken from NASA’s TERRA and AQUA satellites, using data gathered by the [MODIS](http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov/about/) system (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer). The time lapse imagery shows a truly stunning Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes from September—when all five were open—to now, when ice covers the vast majority of the lakes. You’ll notice how early the freeze began, with ice reported in the bays and harbors of the Great Lakes as early as the end of November, as opposed to the usual time of mid-December. From that early build—due to cold temperatures in the fall and early winter in the Great Lakes—the ice just continued to grow. For all that, 2014 could well be an aberration. Satellite data shows a generally downward trend in Great Lakes ice cover from 1972 to the present, thanks largely to the [general increase](http://www.wicci.wisc.edu/climate-change.php) in winter temperatures over the same time period. The winter of 2014 will go down in the record books—and there’s no clearer evidence of that than the image of the Great Lakes, sheathed in ice. But we may not see too many repeat performances in a warmer future. **(MORE:** [**The Not So Sustainable Sochi Winter Olympics**](http://science.time.com/2014/01/30/sochi-winter-olympics-environmental-damage/)**)** ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/9480/great-lakes-frozen-time-lapse-video/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/9480/great-lakes-frozen-time-lapse-video/"},"headline":"Watch the Great Lakes Freeze Over","datePublished":"2014-02-24T03:12:58.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-21T06:28:39.043Z","description":"Beautiful time lapse imagery shows Lake Superior and the rest of the Great Lakes freeze over during this year's brutally cold winter","url":"https://time.com/9480/great-lakes-frozen-time-lapse-video/","keywords":["weather","NASA","Detroit","winter","NOAA","chicago","ICE","Time-lapse"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6d537667c274e03b/698682fc1eebf7107536f8c6/lake-superior-frozen.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Bryan Walsh","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/bryan-walsh/"}],"articleSection":"Science","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt6d537667c274e03b/698682fc1eebf7107536f8c6/lake-superior-frozen.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Lake Superior Frozen","caption":"Satellite image from Feb. 2014 shows near-record ice cover on Lake Superior","creditText":"NOAA/GLERL","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/science/","name":"Science"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/weather/","name":"weather"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/9480/great-lakes-frozen-time-lapse-video/","name":"Watch the Great Lakes Freeze Over"}}]}] ```