Water Levels in 3 Great Lakes Dip Far Below Normal

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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/us/14 ... ref=slogin

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Water levels in the three upper Great Lakes are wavering far below normal, and experts expect Lake Superior, the northernmost lake, to reach a record low in the next two months, according to data from the international bodies that monitor the Great Lakes, the world’s largest freshwater reservoir.

Losing Water Although the cause of the falling levels is in dispute, the effects in Lakes Michigan and Huron are visible everywhere. Ship channels are overdue for dredging. Wetlands in some areas like Georgian Bay, east of Lake Huron in Ontario, have dried up, leaving fish and birds without accustomed places to reproduce.

Beaches around Saginaw Bay in Michigan have reverted to marshes as shorefront reverts to wetlands. One-third of the Michigan boat ramps are unusable.

Although the drop in levels in all three lakes is variously ascribed to climate change or new rainfall patterns, evidence is growing that people caused some losses in Lakes Huron and Michigan.

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Gravel mining early in the 20th century by private companies and dredging by the Army Corps of Engineers, particularly in the mid-1960s, may have widened and deepened the St. Clair River, through which those two lakes drain into Lake Erie.

The flow may be eroding the riverbed. The erosion may in turn result in increased outflow, more than can be replenished by rain or snowmelt, according to a study by a group of Canadian coastal engineers.

Data being released this week by a group of Canadian homeowners, supplementing an engineering study from 2005 by W. F. Baird and Associates, a Canadian business, indicates that the outflow is undiminished and may be significantly greater than earlier estimates.

If the new estimates are correct, 2.5 billion gallons a year are being lost through the expanded parts of the St. Clair, roughly the equivalent of the amount diverted annually for Chicago’s needs.

Robert B. Nairn, a coastal and river engineer who is a principal at Baird, said in an interview Monday, “I was surprised that something of this magnitude could be happening.”

Although Mr. Nairn said the man-made changes were consequential, he was cautious about speculating whether they had played a greater role in the water loss than other factors, like climate change.

“I think we found that all of those contributed to some degree,” he said. “The big question that remains is how much is each contributing.”

Those questions are a central focus of a new study begun under the auspices of the International Joint Commission, a binational group whose members are appointed by the governments in Washington and Ottawa to monitor the boundaries and water quality of the Great Lakes.

Eugene Stakhiv, an official of the Army Corps of Engineers on loan to the commission, said the Baird group had raised significant questions.

“They raised concerns and came to conclusions that make sense within the information and models they used,” Mr. Stakhiv said. “But I think there are still many uncertainties.”

That the water levels in the upper lakes are falling is certain. Data from the corps’s Web site indicates that Lake Superior has almost reached its record low, set in 1926.

Roger Gauthier, a project manager at the Great Lakes Commission, an intergovernmental body representing eight states and two Canadian provinces, said water levels in Lakes Michigan and Huron had dropped three feet since 1999 and were about seven inches above the record low set in 1964.

The persistence of low water in Lakes Huron and Michigan has been out of keeping with the larger cycles of high and low water in the basin.

The level of Lakes St. Clair and Erie, more southerly lakes, has been slightly above average. These lakes receive the Huron and Michigan outflow. Intake of abnormally high amounts of water could raise their levels. But so could unusually high rainfalls.

Mr. Stakhiv said he would not prejudge the cause of these changing water levels before new measurements were taken.

But the Georgian Bay Association, the homeowners’ group that hired Baird, says it believes that its study has identified the problem, and its members are impatient for a solution.

“We obviously believe that the river is eroding,” said Bill Bialkowski, a homeowner who is an engineer and took the new measurements. “It would be nice to stabilize it where it’s occurring.”

Representative Candice S. Miller, Republican of Michigan’s 10th District, which includes shoreline of Lakes Huron and St. Clair, said she had tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain a $3 million to $5 million Congressional appropriation to pay for an Army Corps of Engineers study of the crucial waterways.

If the Baird hypothesis is correct, Ms. Miller said, “you’re diverting millions of gallons into the Atlantic Ocean.”
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tjconheady
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what? it's not global warning!?!?! what!?!?!?!

I miss the days of the flooding of edgemere drive here on the shore of Ontario
TJC

www.conheady.net...a cleaner, less biased, less censored, less-Matted forum
Rick

My buddy lives on the Lake on Beach Ave. He's been lived in his house for 5 years and grew up down the shore a little ways in Webster. He says he hasn't seen the water this low since he can remember.
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Lake Huron water levels spell deep trouble

The lake has dropped a metre in last decade and theories abound about the cause

When Julie Woodyear was a kid, she and her brother raced each other around their family's Georgian Bay island in dinghies.

Thirty years later, a dinghy race would involve dragging the boats over land because her island is no longer an island. It's become part of the mainland.

Hers is a familiar story around Lake Huron where, over the past decade, water levels have dropped about a metre. Docks that stretch more than 100 metres now lead to land. Boats have been abandoned in boathouses 300 metres from water. Tanker owners complain they can no longer get their ships to ports. Wetlands have turned to meadows. And marinas, like Brian Ramler's in Waubaushene, have had to cut business by half because boats can't land in knee-deep water.

Forecasts hold it will get even worse. The Army Corps of Engineers predicts Lake Huron will drop another 20 centimetres by next spring. And Environment Canada hydrologists predict that given another dry winter, the lake will break its all-time low since scientists began to record water levels almost 150 years ago.

"Everyone's holding their breath," says Mary Muter.

Muter is part of the Georgian Bay Association, a group of cottagers that point to the St. Clair River as the problem. They say that since it was last dredged in 1962 to make way for bigger boats, it has been eroding and draining extra water from Lake Huron to Lake Erie.

A report commissioned by the Georgian Bay Association in 2005 revealed parts of the river had deepened by as much as 6 metres, letting out about 3.2 billion litres of water per day. Now they say more than three times as much water used by Torontonians a day is coursing down the river.

But on Thursday, the International Joint Commission study group released video clips of the deepest parts of the St. Clair River. They show blankets of boulders and heavy stones that could not be moved by fast-flowing water.

"There is no more erosion going on," said Gene Stakhiv, co-chair of the study group that is continuing to investigate the river over the next year and a half before making its conclusion before the IJC which oversees the Great Lakes for both Canada and the United States.

"This is a hard bed."

That doesn't mean that the river hasn't eroded in the past. And the author of the Georgian Bay Report, river and coastal engineer Rob Nairn says the videos he's seen don't prove erosion isn't still happening – as the areas shown to the public weren't the hot spots of erosion he'd found anyway.

So what else could be behind Lake Huron's dramatic drop?

Some say the lakes are just doing what they've always done – rising and lowering in cycles.

"We've had three decades of really wet conditions, so a lot of development has taken place and people got accustomed to the high water levels," says David Fay, manager of Environment Canada's Great Lakes-St. Lawrence regulation office in Cornwall.

Others think this is a new, irreversible trend.

One theory relates to precipitation. The lower Great Lakes, including Erie and Ontario, have benefited from tropical storms that have run north and dumped water on them.

"But, (the storms) don't make it as far north or west to reach the upper lakes," says Cynthia Sellinger, a hydrologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab in Michigan.

Another theory points to the glaciers which, during the Ice Age, carved out the Great Lakes, pushing down land beneath their bottoms. Since then, most lakes have been gradually "rebounding" at different rates.

And then there's global warming, which the International Panel of Climate Change says will lower the levels of all the Great Lakes with less consistent precipitation and greater evaporation in winter. The worst-case scenario calls for a 1.2-metre drop in the average level of lakes Huron and Michigan, says Fay.

Then there are other aspects of the St. Clair River. Charts from 1867 show two large sand spits at the base of Lake Huron, pinching the head of the river. Back then, massive tongues of sand and gravel would regularly sweep down the river, moving 10 metres a year, slowing the flow of water, says Nairn.

"These tongues are depleting," he says. "There is a lot less sand coming down the system now."

If it gets to the point they are not being produced at all, the result would "be very dire, because the river would just get deeper and deeper," Nairn says.

Regardless of what the IJC study group concludes, many people – including Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm – insist the flow of water down the St. Clair River must be lessened. While Lakes Ontario and Superior have dams moderating the amount of water flowing from them, mitigating structures proposed for Lake Huron over the years were never built.

Scientists unanimously agree that the dredging and mining of the St. Clair River over the past century has caused Lake Huron to drop by as much as 46 centimetres. The last dredging, which deepened the originally 6-metre-deep river to 8.1 metres, was approved in conjunction with plans for a series of underwater weirs, or speed bumps, which would slow the river's flow and result in a smaller loss of water. But, they were never built, as Roger Gauthier, program manager for the Great Lakes Commission, explains, because the dredging was soon followed by record-high levels of water on Lake Huron.

The result of that last dredging was a permanent loss of around 13 centimetres of water. Putting that water back by finally building those weirs would only cost around $3 million U.S. – $1 million U.S. less than the present study on the St. Clair River by the commission's study group, Gauthier says.

"Now the lake levels have dropped to the point they're having profound economic and ecological adverse effects. The governments should be looking at putting that remediation in now," he says. "We shouldn't study this forever. We should put that in place in the next year or two."

http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/Envi ... cle/273215
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tjconheady wrote:what? it's not global warning!?!?! what!?!?!?!
Ha!
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Ah I see. Save the world by joining the anti-global warming movement.
So let me get the reasons why...
Sick of hearing about it.
It happened millions and thousands of years ago, so it's fine now.
Nothing can be done now, it's not in our hands. (according to who?)
Bash it for the sake of bashing it.

Sounds like what they teach these kids.

Let’s see some data or reasoning to back it up. Not just heresy and talk-show-audience-like reasoning.

It's like every time I post an interesting article on something related to global warming or the environment I hear: "Bah, I'm sick of global warming - [Insert made up fact here]." If you're sick of it, don't click on the threads. Shelter yourself from it all and live in a comfortable bubble. The people that want to learn more will read and learn and they certainly don't want you shitting on every article for the sake of stirring something up. If you read the article and have information to present on the subject, do so. You are welcome to stir up controversy. Just don't come in with comments that contribute nothing.
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