Niagara Falls Was Frozen in 1911

Wel­come dig­gers, the site is fairly slow right now. I apol­o­gize for the inconvenience.

This pho­to­graph is one of two things. Either it’s another amaz­ing piece of Pho­to­shop trick­ery, or it’s an authen­tic cap­ture of an extra­or­di­nary event. I’ve never been to the falls. Does any­one know if a frozen Nia­gara Falls is indeed possible?

via Old rare photo frozen Nia­gara Falls 1911 — Pho­to­shopTech­niques Forums

Update: Here are some more pic­tures (cour­tesy of Black Paint­ings X)

Update 2: Here are some more pic­tures from The Hill­man Stere­oview Archive.

Update 3: If you like these pho­tographs, check out the The Crys­tal Cave of Giants in Mexico

Update 4: Jim Ret­zer was kind enough to send me some screen caps of an 8mm film he found. Check them out here.

Update 5: These screen caps look a lot like Mont­morency Falls to me. See this National Geo­graphic photo from 1978 for a comparison.

Update 6: Here is some news footage of a 25 foot frozen water­fall in Esto­nia.

The Valaste water­fall on the north-east coast of Esto­nia is the high­est in the coun­try. At 25 metres high, the water­fall is a spec­tac­u­lar site in any sea­son, but with recent weather con­di­tions it has been trans­formed into a win­ter wonderland.

Update 7: Here are a few mod­ern day pho­tos of the falls. Not frozen, but close.

Update 8: You can check Snopes’ deter­mi­na­tion on the issue here. As of this update, they claim the myth is: undetermined.

Although it may seem astound­ing to con­tem­plate, the tremen­dous vol­ume of rush­ing water (hun­dreds of thou­sands of gal­lons per sec­ond) that is Nia­gara Falls does “freeze” from time to time, although not quite “com­pletely” as sug­gested in the text accom­pa­ny­ing the above-displayed image. (Despite the abun­dance of ice vis­i­ble in the image, water can still be seen flow­ing over the falls in sev­eral dis­tinct streams.) Dur­ing occa­sional peri­ods of pro­longed cold weather falling water and spray from Nia­gara Falls may freeze into ice for­ma­tions, and ice mounds or floes may form in the Nia­gara River (some­times cre­at­ing ice bridges that stretch across the width of the river), but only once in recorded his­tory has freez­ing weather actu­ally stopped water from flow­ing over the falls. This instance occurred in March 1848 when a pre­pon­der­ance of ice above the falls reduced the flow of water over the falls to a trickle, as reported in the Buf­falo Express newspaper:

The Falls of Nia­gara can be com­pared to noth­ing but a mere mill dam this morn­ing. In the mem­ory of the old­est inhab­i­tants, never was there so lit­tle water run­ning over Niagara’s awful precipice, as at this moment! Hun­dreds of peo­ple are now wit­ness­ing that which never has, and prob­a­bly never may again be wit­nessed on the Nia­gara River. Last night at 11 o’clock the fac­to­ries fed from the waters of this majes­tic river were in full oper­a­tion, and at 12 o’clock the water was shut off, the wheel sud­denly ceased their rev­o­lu­tions, and every­thing was hushed into silence. Var­i­ous are the con­jec­tures as to the cause; the most rea­son­able of which is that Lake Erie must be mak­ing a grand deliv­ery of ice, and this the mouth of the Nia­gara, although large, is not quite enough to take in the whole at once, and that the con­se­quences are, back water.