High winds have blasted much of northern New York state, cutting power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, closing schools and pushing mounds of ice on to the shores of Lake Erie. The ice was on the water's surface but was blown off the lake and on to the shore. | The Guardian

Deep beneath Lake Erie is a massive salt mine, stretching from Edgewater Beach to Burke Lakefront Airport and north about 3 miles. Cargill Deicing Technology extracts as much as 4 million tons of salt each year from the maze of tunnels, to sell as far as Minnesota and Massachusetts. The salt is leftover from a giant inland sea that 400 million years ago stretched from Michigan to New York. You could delve anywhere in that swath to find salt. Photos: Marvin Fong | cleveland.com

Check this out! Two straight days of gale force winds and freezing temperatures left homes encased in ice on Lake Erie in Hamburg, New York! (Courtesy: WROC via CNN) fox6now.com/weather | FOX6 News Milwaukee