Twitter users marveled at the circulating photos of a frozen-solid Niagara Falls this week, but there's one small problem: The photos are old and the famous waterfalls are not frozen solid.
Much of the United States fought through the polar vortex that gripped parts of the country earlier this week, but the cold wasn't enough to do more than
partially ice over the Falls, according to Washington Post blogger Caitlin Dewey.
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"Niagara Falls gets cold every year (I know, as I’m from there). The average temperature in Niagara Falls in January is between 16 and 32 degrees, not terribly different from the 19 to 23 degrees expected today," Dewey wrote. "Naturally, it being that cold, ice floes and giant icicles form on the falls. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. It is not, to put it bluntly, big polar vortex news. Case in point: Many of the pictures going around today are, in fact, from several years ago."
BuzzFeed helped trace back some of the photos going around online this week. For example, this photo…
… was actually uploaded to Flickr in 2007.
This one…
…was first posted on a
Niagara Falls travel deals website in January 2012.
And, finally, this one…
…was
posted on this blog in February 2011.
Here is a live feed of what the Falls actually look like today.
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