Around 1.1 billion people live around lakes that freeze
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Like melting sea ice and glaciers, the frozen sheets that used to cover lakes are vanishing, too. Lake ice loss has accelerated over the past 25 years, with lakes melting 45 days per century earlier in the northern hemisphere.
“The loss of ice in freshwater systems has consequences that are social, environmental and economic,” says Stephanie Hampton of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC.
Scientists have only recently started to recognise the important ecological role of lake…
