( light music) - I'm Tom Finley from Schlitz Audubon Nature center where I'm the Director of Education, and today we're going to talk about ice formations and ice safety.

I never ever get too close to the edge.

I always wear ice cleats.

You can use snowshoes.

Poles are very good for testing the ice, even a stick.

You may not realize it but I'm standing at least three maybe four feet above a summertime beach line.

And as the ice builds up, and the cold continues, then what will happen is succeeding wave action starts to do its magic and starts to carve in certain areas so you see nice little bass.

It can flip ice on top of existing shells.

If it's a nice calm day, You do actually get sheet ice and then that sheet ice makes a really interesting creaking breaking noise and that will pile up too with wave action.

With a good camera you can really see embedded in the ice shelves, rocks.

You'll see sand.

So, it shows you the power of the waves that they can carry and even throw rocks, sand, and gravel all over the place.

The brake walls in larger cities do have a tendency to change the wave action so that you might not get quite the prolonged and pronounced formations that we have.

So this is one of the really special things about Wisconsin, and being on Lake Michigan shoreline, you're not going to see this really anywhere else, unless you have a shoreline of a great lake, like we do here in the Greater Milwaukee area.