14 DAY TRIAL // Expedition 38 crew members aboard the International Space Station (ISS) were recently able to capture this amazing image of structures known as ice stringers on the surface of Lake Michigan, the only Great Lake located entirely within the United States. Most of the formations you can see above were located near and around Washington Island.
The image was collected using a Nikon D3X digital camera and a 1,000-millimeter (39.3-inch) lens, on February 22, 2014. North is to the lower left of the image in this view. The picture has been processed to remove various optical artifacts. The ISS flies around 420 kilometers (261 miles) above the surface.
Rock Island is visible here to the left-most part of the image. It is connected by a relatively large ice mass to Washington Island (center), which itself is connected via another ice field to Detroit Island. The two smaller islands to the center-left of the picture are far away enough to avoid being connected to their larger brethren via ices.
The two large ice stringers illustrated here start from the tip of Detroit Island and a small peninsula on Washington Island and head diagonally to the upper-left corner of the image. Experts say that they were produced by southwesterly winds and add that their width is determined by the length of coastlines that feed them.