Opinion: Long Islanders Spend Week Living In 'Ice Age' Conditions

This last week has been a week of single digit temperatures during the night and cold daytime temperatures in the teens. Welcome to Ice Age conditions. The fact that Long Island itself was formed by the melting of an ice sheet during the Ice Age is fascinating. The Ice Age reached its last peak 22,000 years ago. As the Ice Age started to end, the Laurentide Ice Sheet that formed 60,000 year ago retreated or melted. Then between 12,000 and 6,000 years ago Long Island took shape.The topography of the North Fork is truly influenced by the "moraine" edge of the Laurentide Ice Sheet that at one time covered almost all of North America. According to dictionary.com, a moraine is "a ridge, mound, or irregular mass of unstratified glacial drift, chiefly boulders, gravel, sand, and clay."

Wikipedia.org also claims the average earth temperature during the ice age was 12 degrees. So this last week we all on Long Island lived in literal Ice Age conditions.

As of Tuesday, the Great South Bay is frozen from Patchogue/Bellport/Sayville all the way to Fire Island. Just yesterday a tugboat had to be rescued from the frozen Hudson River by a Coast Guard ice breaker. I saw absolutely no vessels in the ice on the Great South Bay today. Although lots of kids are skating and playing ice hockey on the many frozen ponds all over Long Island. While doing the research for this article I read that intense global warming accelerated 10,000 years ago, causing the glaciers to rapidly recede. There are many places on Long Island such as Sands Point Preserve, Northport and Stony Brook where moraines are visible to a trained eye.

There are various theories on what caused the Ice Age. The consensus is that it began 2.6 trillion years ago. Was it a huge asteroid, or the earth wobbling on its orbits, or some sort of solar event? No one knows for sure. The one thing I know for sure was that these last few days saw many car batteries fail, oil trucks making emergency deliveries, and lots of Long Islanders bundled up. In a few south shore communities a few hundred polar club enthusiasts went for their polar plunge into the ocean. However, on the bays and ong the Long Island Sound such events were canceled due to frozen water.

Next time it is over 90 degrees for a week, I am going to reread this post, and then jump into the ocean for a cool, refreshing swim.

Photo courtesy T.J. Clemente.