Watch As Lake Erie Sends A Massive 40-Foot 'Ice Tsunami' Crashing Ashore

Ed Mazza
Updated

A massive “ice tsunami” created a surreal scene on the shores of Lake Erie in both Ontario, Canada, and near Buffalo, New York, over the weekend.

High winds pushed ice through the Niagara River and into the lake, and eventually forced it ashore, creating what’s more formally known as an “ice shove” in Fort Erie, Canada and Hamburg, N.Y.

Storm chaser David Piano told CNN the ice wall was 40 feet high in spots and “starting to bulldoze trees and street lamps.”

Similar scenes were reported elsewhere along Lake Erie, including at Hoover Beach in Hamburg, just outside of Buffalo. WGRZ, the local NBC station, said the ice shove hit 30 feet high in parts of Hoover Beach:

“This is the first time in my entire life I’ve seen it come this high and this close to the house,” longtime resident Jack Schultz told the Buffalo News. “It came up in sheets. It just layered it up to the wall. Then, when the (ice) boom broke, it took all the pressure out of here.”

National Geographic said ice shoves ― also called ice pushes and ivu ― are created by high winds and “are most likely to occur in the early spring, when ice just starts to weaken and break up.”

CORRECTION: A HuffPost video in a previous version of this story misidentified Lake Erie as Lake Ontario.

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A New York street is shown during the blizzard of 1888. The blizzard that occured March 12-14 paralyzed the city with 40" of snow and winds that reached up to 60 miles per hour, creating drifts as high as 50 feet. Telegraph and telephone poles and wires were downed and lay in the streets.
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1947 Snowstorm in the Bronx.
1947 Snowstorm in the Bronx.
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Cop helps fallen man to rise during snowstorm on West Broadway, on Feb. 14, 1940.
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The Flatiron Building after a snowstorm in 1905.
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