ALASKA IS MELTING!
Thursday, September 26, 2019 at 09:55PM For the past 7 years I have collected a list of fatal ice accidents on North American lakes and rivers. Over this period, on average, there has been less than one fatality per year from Alaska and northern Canada. This year there were 14 from Alaska and four from Northern Canada. Most of those were on rivers. Rivers are an important winter transportation. All of them were on vehicles, mostly snowmobiles with a couple ATVs and a small tractor.
There were no fatal accidents in January and February. There was one in November, three in December and the rest in March, April and early May. This suggests that the ice was unexpectedly dodgy in the shoulder months.
It also looks like the southern edge of the ice belt moved about 200 miles north this year. We had no accidents in places like Georgia and Missouri.
