Patricia Lake is a

lake A lake is an area filled with water, localized in a basin, surrounded by land, and distinct from any river or other outlet that serves to feed or drain the lake. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean, although, like the much large ...

Jasper National Park Jasper National Park is a national park in Alberta, Canada. It is the largest national park within Alberta's Rocky Mountains spanning . It was established as a national park in 1930 and declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984. Its locatio ...

Alberta Alberta ( ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is part of Western Canada and is one of the three prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to the west, Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Ter ...

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

, near the town of

Jasper Jasper, an aggregate of microgranular quartz and/or cryptocrystalline chalcedony and other mineral phases,Kostov, R. I. 2010. Review on the mineralogical systematics of jasper and related rocks. – Archaeometry Workshop, 7, 3, 209-213PDF/ref> ...

. It was named for Princess Patricia of Connaught, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. It is connected by Pyramid Lake road and hiking trails to the town of Jasper, as well as other tourist sites such as Pyramid Lake and Pyramid Mountain.

Project Habbakuk

Patricia Lake is notable for its involvement during

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

with Project Habbakuk, a plan to build an unsinkable aircraft carrier from an ice-based composite material termed "

Pykrete Pykrete is a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight). During World War II, Geoffrey Pyke proposed it as a candidate material fo ...

". Initial studies of natural lake ice had been carried out at Lake Louise. In January 1943, Patricia Lake was chosen as the test site for building a prototype vessel. The planned vessel was to be long and the prototype was to be a 1:10 scale model of this. In fact, the beam was to approximately this scale, but the length was only 60 feet, about a third of scale. Patricia Lake was chosen for this work on account of having rail connections at Jasper and being a suitably cold, remote area that already had military training involvement in the area as camouflage. There were also

Mennonite Mennonites are groups of Anabaptist Christian church communities of denominations. The name is derived from the founder of the movement, Menno Simons (1496–1561) of Friesland. Through his writings about Reformed Christianity during the Radi ...

and

Doukhobor The Doukhobours or Dukhobors (russian: духоборы / духоборцы, dukhobory / dukhobortsy; ) are a Spiritual Christian ethnoreligious group of Russian origin. They are one of many non-Orthodox ethno-confessional faiths in Russia a ...

communities nearby, religious conscientious objectors, who could provide the labour needed. Pykrete construction material for the full-sized ship was to be a composite of ice and sawdust, maintained by refrigeration. The first experiments had used natural lake ice, in a Canadian winter. The model ship was to use plain ice, but partly natural and partly refrigerated. Construction proceeded through March 1943 by building a wooden cabin on the frozen lake, installing refrigeration equipment and a nest of 6 inch cold air ducts, and then increasing the height of the ice wall around the cabin. As weight increased, the bottom of the "hull" was sawn free from the lake ice and the model floated free. In June the refrigeration was switched off, but the model lasted the whole summer before melting and sinking. A diving expedition to the site in 1985 found the remains of the model on a steep slope just off-shore at a depth between . Although the refrigeration equipment was removed before sinking, the wooden walls of the hull, an "incredible jumble" of cold air ductwork and also a great quantity of the bitumen used as part of the insulation remained at the site. As of June 26, 2011 only the west wall of the structure remained intact; the rest has fallen to pieces and lies at depths of between in depth. An underwater plaque at the site notes its part in World War II history. The site continues to be visited by recreational divers. The wreckage has deteriorated in recent years and has suffered from vandalism and graffiti.

References

{{authority control Jasper National Park Lakes of Alberta