WARMING WATERS: Lake Superior, the world's largest freshwater lake, is heating up, experts say.
Image: ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY
The Great Lakes are feeling the heat from climate change.
As the world's largest freshwater system warms, it is poised to systematically alter life for local wildlife and the tribes that depend on it, according to regional experts. And the warming could also provide a glimpse of what is happening on a more global level, they say.
"The Great Lakes in a lot of ways have always been a canary in the coal mine," Cameron Davis, the senior adviser to the U.S. EPA on the Great Lakes, said last week. "Not just for the region or this country, but for the rest of the world."
And it seems the canary's song is growing ever more halting.
Lake Superior, which is the largest, deepest and coldest of the five lakes, is serving as the "canary for the canary," Davis said at a public meeting of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force last week, pointing to recent data trends.
Total ice cover on the lake has shrunk by about 20 percent over the past 37 years, he said. Though the change has made for longer, warmer summers, it's a problem because ice is crucial for keeping water from evaporating and it regulates the natural cycles of the Great Lakes.
But the warming shows no sign of abatement. This year, the waters in Lake Superior are on track to reach -- and potentially exceed -- the lake's record-high temperatures of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, which occurred in 1998.
Analysis of several buoys that measure temperatures in the lake reveal that the waters are some 15 degrees warmer than they would normally be at this time of year, Jay Austin, a professor of physics at the University of Minnesota, Duluth's Large Lakes Observatory, said in a recent interview.
His analysis of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data indicates that summer for the lake, which happens at about a 40-degree threshold, came about a month early this year.
A 'tremendously anomalous' year
"This year is just tremendously anomalous," he said. "This year ranks up there with the warmest water we have ever seen, and the warming trend appears to be going on in all of the Great Lakes."
While the warmer waters make for more comfortable swimming conditions for humans, they may also make for more habitable conditions for invasive species in places that have previously been relatively free of such pests.
Exhibit one, said James Kitchell, a professor of zoology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison's Center for Limnology, is the blood-sucking sea lamprey.
The jawless parasite attaches itself to the side of trout, bores a hole and sucks the trout's blood, growing to as long as 3 feet in the process, according to Kitchell. But in warmer weather, the lamprey may feed faster, grow bigger and lay more eggs, he said. The creatures will also become adults faster and require more frequent extermination, thanks to the warmer waters, warned Marc Gaden, a spokesman for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission, in an interview.
Meanwhile, the dead trout, with gaping holes in their sides, will sink to the seafloor below -- far from where humans can witness the evidence.
But the full impact of decades of water warming is not bound to the murky depths.
The warming may also threaten practices that are central to the "cultural identity" of indigenous tribes that live in the Great Lakes area and depend on certain weather and water conditions to farm wild rice, according to Nancy Schuldt, the water quality coordinator of the Fond du Lac Band of Chippewa Indians.
See what we're tweeting about
10 Comments
Add CommentYet another "canary" that can be ignored or speciously denied - until it is too obvious and too late.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe "Tribes" that depend on the Great Lakes? Would that be the Chicago tribe or the Toronto Tribe, or maybe the Cleveland Indians?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTime to trade in the canoes for zodiacs. They've learned to supplement their harpoons with .50 cals on the left coast.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith all due respect to the Fond du Lac Tribe and the Bad River Tribe, what about the rest of us.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo, this Climatewire story is not reporting any newly published research findings but merely some interviews with a couple of attendees of "a public meeting of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force last week, pointing to recent data trends."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWere they discussing average surface water temperature from five location on the lake? How long have these temperature measurements been keep? The record goes back to 1998 - was that the first year of data collection?
This 'news' contains more hidden agendas and questions than information.
P.S. - I'm not denying anything, but this is B.S.
Lake Superior is not the largest fresh water lake, Lake Baikal in Russia is, shame on you S.A.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisrichardebridges@aol.com
And shame on you for poor reading comprehension. The article says "Lake Superior, which is the largest, deepest and coldest of the five lakes", not "the largest fresh water lake in the world"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe article also says "the world's largest freshwater system". Again, not the largest individual lake.
I'm not sure which you were referring too, but unless the article has been edited in the last half hour, You might want to show your embarrassment appropriately.
Just saying.
I live near Duluth, and I know of no place in Lake Superior itself where Wild Rice ever grew. Some members of the Fond du Lac Band no doubt harvest Wild Rice in nearby inland lakes and marshy bottoms of tributaries such as Saint Louis River, but the temperatures of Lake Superior are irrelevant. Even if I am mistaken, and there are shallow flats in Lake Superior with Wild Rice, I am extremely skeptical that the temperatures are anywhere near the intolerable range for the plant species. Lake Superior is much colder than the inland lakes where Wild Rice flourishes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe fantastic "scientific" reporting is unbelievable. Such "scientific" statements such as:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Total ice cover on the lake has shrunk by about 20 percent over the past 37 years"
and "This year, the waters in Lake Superior are on track to reach -- and potentially exceed -- the lake's record-high temperatures of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, which occurred in 1998" just are undeniable truths - fit right in with Al Gore's statements about New York city being under water soon!
If there are any real scientists with ethics out there let them know that I have studied the Great Lake's water temperatures and they "vary" but show NO pattern of warming over the past 83 years!
This proves to me, since I know the "truths" reported here are false, that Global Warming is just another scare tactic wherein fraudulent scientists merely want more government handouts for their "research"!
Ken Kodger
The fantastic "scientific" reporting is unbelievable. Such "scientific" statements such as:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Total ice cover on the lake has shrunk by about 20 percent over the past 37 years"
and "This year, the waters in Lake Superior are on track to reach -- and potentially exceed -- the lake's record-high temperatures of 68 degrees Fahrenheit, which occurred in 1998" just are undeniable truths - fit right in with Al Gore's statements about New York city being under water soon!
If there are any real scientists with ethics out there let them know that I have studied the Great Lake's water temperatures and they "vary" but show NO pattern of warming over the past 83 years!
This proves to me, since I know the "truths" reported here are false, that Global Warming is just another scare tactic wherein the fraudulent scientists merely want more government handout for their "research"!