Most homeowners can expect to wake up to opening their front door and finding a newspaper resting on their porch step. But this past weekend, Minnesota residents in the Mille Lacs Lake area came outside to a wave of ice blanketing their backyards and compromising their homes. According to the National Weather Service, northerly winds at 30 to 40 miles an hour pushed melting ice off the lake, causing an ice wave to come ashore.

       "It was just pushing and breaking and pushing and breaking," Darla Johnson, who made a video of Saturday's "ice tsunami," reportedly told CNN affiliate WCCO-TV in Minneapolis. Johnson's video had more than 275,000 views on YouTube by Monday morning. Another occurrence of this natural phenomenon happened on Friday in Alberta, Canada on Dauphin Lake, where a wall of ice almost 30 feet high damaged 20 homes, six of which were left irreparable.

      "It basically has the same mechanism of an iceberg," said CNN's Todd Boreck. "Winds, but more so ocean currents, allow icebergs to drift. Same premise: A chunk of ice (relatively shallow) was pushed by a strong, sustained wind. The momentum of the ice sheet overcame the friction of the land."

      "This is worse than a flood, because with a flood, the water just goes through and it's finished. With this, there's still so much ice out on the lake that if the wind picks up again, it could start all over," homeowner Elaine Davis told the CBC.

       As is the case with all natural disasters, all people can do is move out of the way and watch nature take its course, even if that means destroying their homes in the process. "You know you've got cement, concrete blocks and steel, and the ice goes through it like it's just a toothpick," Dennis Stykalo, who also lost a home to the ice, told the CBC.

      Minnesota is experiencing colder than average temperatures for the month of May, leaving residents in distress as they panic about the weather's effect on their homes. Fortunately, the severity has lessened and no injuries have been reported.