With icy air comes a frozen Long Island Sound
You could be forgiven for thinking this February has been colder than usual. It has. But just how much colder — a staggering 10.8 degrees below normal — has surprised even meteorologists, who say the month is on track to become Long Island’s coldest February on record.
The consistent cold snap has caused a rare phenomenon, one not seen for nearly 40 years: Long Island Sound is freezing over, so to speak.
“I’ve never seen it freeze over like this,” said Dominick Mavellia of Southold, whose home overlooks the frozen waters. “It looks like Antarctica … it’s quite beautiful.”
Ice reached thousands of yards into the Sound this week from Long Island’s North Shore, marking the farthest icing of the water in years, residents and experts said. The Sound never completely freezes over due to ship traffic and tides, but this level of icing is historically significant — though no official sources measure the reach of ice in the saltwater body.
This year’s icy Sound has caused some problems for the U.S. Coast Guard, among others.
“We haven’t really been out in the Sound for about a week,” said Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class Tyler West of the Coast Guard’s Long Island Sector, based in New Haven, Conn.
Mr. West said de-icers have kept the shipping channels open in New Haven harbor and that ship traffic has prevented the entire Sound from freezing. But he said the docks around the station are clogged with ice.
“Right now we’re pretty well iced in,” he said. “Our station boats can’t break through the ice.”
This month’s cold snap has been historic in its consistency, said National Weather Service meteorologist John Murray.
“This is an extreme low, and that’s significant when you’re talking about a monthly temperature,” he said. Normally, he explained, cold days average out with warmer ones during less brutal winters.
But this February, the cold days have averaged with even colder ones. That’s thanks to a prolonged dip in the Canadian jet stream that has allowed arctic air from Canada to blast the area.
Not even Sunday’s warmer temperatures did much to change the overall numbers, Mr. Murray said.
“It was just one day,” he said. “The low temperatures at night have all been in the single digits.”
Through Sunday, the average daily temperature at the National Weather Service’s station at Islip was 21.5 degrees, far below normal.
That average is also much lower than the previous February cold record, set at 27.1 degrees in 2007.
“If we end the month at 21.5, it would be the coldest February in the history of the station at Islip,” dating back to 1984, Mr. Murray said.
Stony Brook University oceanography professor Henry Bokuniewicz said, “It takes a severe event to cause the Sound to freeze,” adding that it would be impossible for Long Island Sound to freeze over completely.
The most recent deep freezes occurred in the 1970s, said Mr. Bokuniewicz. According to Suffolk Times articles from January and February 1977, ice had heavily clogged parts of the Sound and local bay waters. That winter, according to a Jan. 27, 1977, photo caption, a bell buoy in Mattituck that normally sat 3,000 yards north of the inlet was dragged ashore by moving ice after the freezing waters snapped its anchor chain.
By Feb. 3, the Sound was covered in “widespread ice” caused by “the worst winter in memory,” according to a Suffolk Times cover story. The icing was so bad, that Cross Sound Ferry service, and ferries to Plum Island, had to be canceled. A week later, a ferry attempted to cross to Plum Island but couldn’t break through to the ferry slip there. Instead, the captain beached the ship on the ice and workers walked to shore after climbing down a ladder.
That same week, a French oil tanker couldn’t reach the Northville oil terminal due to the ice, according to newspaper accounts.
A 1977 article in the Hartford Courant states the Sound had been “packed” with ice for two months before thawing in late February.
The front page of the Feb. 22, 1979, Port Jefferson Record shows a photo of an oil tanker surrounded by ice in the Sound.
Although Mr. Bokuniewicz said it’s impossible, late 19th-century anecdotes in area newspapers claim the Sound did freeze completely.
In February 1875, the Long Islander reported that the Sound was frozen over from Huntington Bay to Norwalk, Conn.
In February 1888, Stewart Terry of Southold told the Brooklyn Eagle that in 1780 the Sound was “completely frozen over and a relative of his who was married in Connecticut was driven across on the ice and landed at Orient Point.”
Another deep freeze came in 1916, nearly freezing over the Sound, according to the Long Islander.
Mr. Bokuniewicz said the Sound normally begins freezing over in shallower water.
“It freezes just like any other pond would freeze,” he said.
Most winters, the force of the tide will break up ice forming at the shoreline. But if icing occurs fast enough, it will harden and begin expanding farther out into deeper waters.
“It’s a race between the formation of ice and the removal of ice by the tides and currents,” he said. It’s a race that, recently, the ice has been winning, he said.
The professor said the ice is “certainly a stress” to flora and fauna in the water and along the shore, especially salt marshes that could be damaged by ice freezing around vegetation and breaking it off.
But Riverhead Foundation for Marine Research and Preservation executive director Rob DiGiovanni said animals like seals may have a more ideal environment with a frozen Sound.
“Maybe it’s even creating an environment for them to haul out on, where they can’t be disturbed,” he theorized. But he said it will be hard to determine the icing’s impact until after the ice breaks away and animals can reach the beaches again.
“If the seals don’t have access to the beaches, they’re not going to show up on the beaches stranded,” Mr. DiGiovanni said.
He added that residents who see animals on the beach as the weather warms should report the sightings to the Riverhead Foundation and avoid getting close to the creatures.
Mr. Bokuniewicz agreed that while it may seem dangerous to wild animals for the Sound’s surface to freeze over, most will likely be fine.
“It’s rare that the freezing goes down to the bottom,” Mr. Bokuniewicz said. “Most of the animals will hunker down into deeper waters.”
People along the North Shore in Southold and Riverhead towns who have been hunkering down themselves this winter say they are in awe of the expanses of ice.
“I woke up and it was completely frozen solid,” said Southold resident Brian Wolfe.
Mr. Wolfe’s family, who formerly lived on Main Road, moved to their Soundfront home near Kenney’s Beach two years ago. He said this winter is already out of the ordinary.
“It wasn’t rolling or anything,” he said while standing at his front door this week as the wind whipped over the Sound. “Every once in a while you see big ice blocks on the beach, but it’s never frozen over.”
Jerry McGrath, who has spent the past 40 years living in Wading River, said the Sound hasn’t looked this frozen in a long time.
He can remember the last time the Sound froze over in the late 1970s. This year, the freezing has been just as bad.
“When you looked out from beach level, you couldn’t see beach water,” he said. “It was pretty profound. It makes it look like it goes on eternally.”
