Great Lakes Get Deepest Freeze in Two Decades

We live in an age of ironies: While the Earth warms up, some local areas get incredibly cold. Anyone suffering through the recent polar vortex excursions (and another is on its way) knows that. The U.S. Midwest has suffered the brunt of this. Every year, it gets cold enough for long enough that some amount of the Great Lakes freezes, but this year about 88% of the surface area of the lakes was frozen--an amount not seen since 1994! The image above was taken by NASA's Aqua, an Earth-observing sat...