Photo and caption from Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel: Does Lake Michigan’s record low mark beginning of new era for Great Lakes? At least 150 years of rhythmic pulses in Lake Michigan’s water levels appear to have shifted abruptly with loss of winter ice. Photo by Mark Hoffman, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Don’t get complacent, yet. Has enough water fallen in the Great Lakes drainage area in the past six months to change this situation at all? From the New York Times last June:
Drought and other factors have created historically low water marks for the Great Lakes, putting the $34 billion Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway shipping industry in peril, a situation that could send ominous ripples throughout the economy.
Water levels in the Great Lakes have been below their long-term averages during the past 14 years, and this winter the water in Lakes Michigan and Huron, the hardest-hit lakes, dropped to record lows, according to the Army Corps of Engineers. Keith Kompoltowicz, the chief of watershed hydrology with the corps’s Detroit district, said that in January “the monthly mean was the lowest ever recorded, going back to 1918.”
While spring rains have helped so far this year, levels in all five Great Lakes are still low by historical standards, so getting through the shallow points in harbors and channels is a tense affair.
It’s not just storms, rising sea levels, and melting glaciers, you know.
The Great Lakes from space. The Great Lakes are the largest glacial lakes in the world. NASA photo via Wikipedia
More:
- NOAA’s Great Lakes dashboard
- “Does Lake Michigan’s record low mark beginning of a new era for Great Lakes?” first part of series from Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel On-Line
- National Geographic busts five myths about where the Great Lakes water went, or goes
- Great Lakes fish on a diet (northcountrypublicradio.org)
- A chilly Lake Superior warms up (northcountrypublicradio.org)
- The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald – 38 years ago (blogs.woodtv.com)
- Portman’s Toledo Blade Op-Ed: It’s Now or Never to Keep Asian Carp out of the Great Lakes (portman.senate.gov)
- SUNY Fredonia Research Leads to Call for Ban on Microplastics (wkbw.com)
- The 1913 White Hurricane on the Great Lakes (netnewsledger.com)
- Face scrub micro-beads are choking the Great Lakes (boingboing.net)
- 100 years after ‘deadliest’ winter storm (newsnet5.com)
- Up or down? Which way are Great Lakes water levels headed? (mlive.com)
Great Lakes in Sunglint (NASA, International Space Station, 06/14/12) (Photo credit: NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center)
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
That’s a wonderful photo from space, and one I’ve never seen before. Thanks!
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[…] This post is cross-posted, with explicit permission, from Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub. […]
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