Ice on rivers and lakes: a bibliographic essay

Ice on rivers and lakes has many important influences on design and construction of structures, operation of shipping, flow and circulation, water quality, and other factors related to the use of the water resources. Human interest in understanding these influences has led to many programs of data collection, research, and investigations for a century or more. The body of literature reporting on these studies includes several thousand items in textbooks, proceedings, journals, and technical reports. By far, the largest part of the studies were in the United States, Canada, and the Soviet Union. For the sake of this bibliography, the literature can be classified as dealing with basic characteristics of ice; freezing and melting processes and their prediction and control on rivers, and on lakes; effects of river and lake ice on navigation, flow, and structures; and influences of ice on chemical, biological, and the thermal characteristics of water quality.

This bibliography cites about 750 publications dealing with ice. Literature prior to the mid 1960's is summarized in several earlier bibliographies, and therefore this paper concentrates mainly on work over the past decade or so, plus some background from a few earlier reports. The body of literature is large, and this bibliography is not exhaustive; it does provide, however, a representative cross section of the scope of recent work in the field.