The recently completed Winter Carnival Ice Palace might be a few inches smaller after Friday’s 45-degree temperatures, but it’s just as solid as before.
The ice palace was lit up for the first time Thursday night as carnival festivities got underway. It was built using 4,000 blocks of ice and towers 70 feet above Rice Park in downtown St. Paul.
Friday morning, organizers said they didn’t expect the warmer temperatures to threaten the palace. Friday evening, they confirmed the weather hadn’t hurt it.
“We lost a few inches, but it looks really good,” Ecolab Ice Palace Project Manager Joe Gallagher said Friday evening. “The engineers looked at it today and didn’t see any major structural changes, so it looks really solid.”
Warm weather and ice don’t usually mix, but in this case the melting ice will refreeze and help solidify the ice palace, Gallagher said. After temperatures in the 40s today, the high is expected to sink to 32 degrees Saturday and into the teens early next week.
“Really what the warm weather does is it melts the ice between the grooves. The freezing … will make the individual blocks become one,” Gallagher said. “The long-term forecast could not be any better for an ice palace. It’s going to be amazing.”
It would take 60-degree weather or an extended period of temperatures in the mid 40s for the ice palace to be at risk, Gallagher said. Direct sunlight can also pose a threat — and caused the palace to be taken down in 2004 — but this year’s palace is well shaded.
“A week from now, we’ll be thinking more about putting more layers on than taking layers off,” Gallagher said.
Callie Schmidt contributed to this report.
Copyright 2018 Pioneer Press.