"Ice Shove" Wrecks Minnesota Home; This Is A Weird Thing That Has Happened Before

Strong winds earlier this week pushed a ton of lake ice
into this Minnesota house. 

A perfect combination of wind and spring thawing shoved a bulldozer like wall of ice into at least one lakeshore home in Minnesota this past week.

The 10-foot high wall of ice crunched into the home on Lake Mille Lacs in Isle, Minnesota. Isle is little under 100 miles north of Minneapolis.  

Lake Mille Lacs covers about 207 square miles, and the town of Isle is on the southeast corner of the lake. The ice on the lake was weak from the ongoing spring thaw.

As Minnesota Public Radio reports, a warm, mostly sunny day with northwest winds gusting as high as 50 mph on Monday pushed the wall of ice onto the shore in dramatic fashion.

This one smushed a deck and pushed in a wall of the Minnesota house.

Some people call these things ice tsunamis, because they do rise quite a way out of the water and go inland a fair amount like a slow motion, frozen tsunami.

Of course, ice shoves don't occur on every lake and they don't occur most years. You need the right combination of thawing ice that's ready to break up, a warm day, a strong wind and a shoreline to help steer the ice into big piles.

Other ice shoves have caused far more damage than this.

Lakes in Vermont aren't immune to ice shoves. There was a good one on Maquam Bay in St. Albans, Vermont on Lake Champlain in 2013.

Here's a news video from WCCO of the mishap:



An even worse ice shove hit the shoreline of Lake Mille Lacs in 2013:



Ice shoves can be pretty unpredictable, so you should stay away from them, as footage from this February, 2019 Lake Erie ice shove proves:



These things can move pretty fast, all things considered: