With the big winter freeze coming, the ice booms are in the water, people are prepping for ice fishing, and the boats are all long since put away. After seeing someone do this with Lake Superior, we got to wondering--with all that ice, how long would it take to Zamboni ALL of Lake Erie?

Yes...we know...we won't be able to actually do this until the lake really freezes...but let's play the "what if" game for a minute.

What if we really wanted to have a perfect surface to the ice on Lake Erie?  What if we only had one zamboni to do the job?  How long would it take?  Let's do the math...

  • Lake Erie is 9,940 square miles.
  • A standard North American ice rink is 17,000 square feet.
  • Lake Erie = 16,300,664 ice rinks.
  • A single Zamboni machine takes approximately 7 minutes to resurface a standard North American ice rink.
  • It would take 114,104,648 minutes to Zamboni all of Lake Erie. That's 79,239 days or about 217 years.

We're gonna need a bigger Zamboni.

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