Anson Mackay: Lake Baikal Threatened by Proposed Dam→

The Conversation:

“Mongolia is hoping a massive dam on its largest river could provide much needed power and water for the country’s booming mining industry. However environmental groups are concerned that the hydroelectric power plant and a related pipeline project will do immeasurable environmental damage to oldest and deepest freshwater body in the world: Lake Baikal...

he Shuren Hydropower Plant, planned on the Selenga River in northern Mongolia, was first proposed in 2013 and is currently the subject of a World Bank-funded environmental and social impact assessment. In tandem, Mongolia is also considering building one of the world’s largest pipelines to transport water from the Orkhon River, one of the Selenga’s tributaries, to supply the miners in the Gobi desert 1,000km away.

By far the largest and most important of the 350-plus rivers that flow into Lake Baikal is the Selenga River, which contributes almost 50% of the lake’s water. The Selenga and its tributaries cover a vast area, much of it in northern Mongolia, and the catchment of Lake Baikal is bigger than Spain. The river enters Lake Baikal through the Selenga Delta, a wetland of internationally recognised importance.

The delta is crucial to the health of Lake Baikal. Its shallow waters are a key spawning ground for Baikal’s many endemic fish and is on the migratory route for millions of birds every year. It also filters out impurities flowing through the river before they reach the lake.”

Scott K. Johnson: Lake Science Using Remote Sensors→

Ars Technica:

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

“The largest streams that flow into Lake George are now being monitored year-round by sampling stations. Water is pulled into a heated enclosure (ice isn’t helpful) where it is analyzed by a data-logging device with probes for things like temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen, conductivity, dissolved organic matter, and algae content. Other instruments measure the water level and flow velocity of the stream. The data is periodically uploaded over a cellular Internet connection and entered into the project database. And at the same time, a carousel of sample bottles is automatically filled and periodically retrieved for additional tests in the analytical chemistry labs back at the field station.

That same kind of data-logger is also going to be active out in the lake itself, operating from a set of anchored, floating platforms. The floats raise and lower the data-loggers, allowing them to sample a vertical profile of the lake. That’s enormously useful, because the lake stratifies into a warmer surface layer and a cooler deep portion (as most lakes do). The first two floats hit the lake last summer, but five will go out this spring after the ice melts.

A number of current profilers will be placed at the bottom of the lake as well. These devices bounce acoustic waves off particles drifting by, using the slight Doppler shift of the returning waves to calculate velocities at various heights above the device. For now, they will simply store data to be downloaded when they are retrieved, but they may run cables in the future to allow near real-time access.”

Very cool. Data and models will provide useful information for lake management. 

Angelina Davydova: Lake Baikal Water Levels at 30 Year Low→

Angelina Davydova, reporting for Reuters:

Délirante bestiole, Flickr

“In Russia’s Siberian south, near the border of Mongolia, the world’s largest freshwater lake is shrinking. The surrounding communities depend on Lake Baikal, which contains about one-fifth of the earth’s unfrozen freshwater reserves, for their power, water and livelihoods.

But in the past four months the lake’s water level has dropped so low that experts are calling it a crisis – one they warn could lead to conflicts in Russia over water. The lake is now at its lowest level in over 30 years and experts predict it will keep dropping until melting mountain snow and spring rains begin to recharge the lake around late April or mid-May...

For now, the government is allowing the Irkutsk hydroelectric power station to continue drawing river water that might otherwise have supplied the lake in order to keep the region supplied with heat, power and clean water.”

NASA; Irkutsk Dam on the lake's southeast outlet, the Angara River

An Invasive Plant Plays a Conservation Role→

Garry Hamilton, writing for Conservation Magazine:

“The scene at Florida’s Crystal River National Wildlife Refuge in Kings Bay last October would have been familiar to anyone who has ever engaged in the battle to control the spread of invasive plants. Eager volunteers scurried about the shoreline of this manatee wintering ground, carting large plastic bins stuffed with water hyacinth, a notorious aquatic weed that’s caused headaches on five continents. Closer inspection, however, would have revealed the activity to be anything but business as usual: instead of hauling water hyacinth out of the bay, the conservationists were putting it back in—almost 4,300 gallons’ worth by day’s end...

Ultimately, project supporters hope that yesterday’s enemy could be tomorrow’s friend. They believe the hyacinths can play an important role in a conservation strategy that also includes reducing nutrient runoff and restoring spring flows. “Since these invasive plants are here and we can’t get rid of them,” says the University of Georgia’s Evans, “I think it’s counterproductive to be killing them and not taking advantage of their functions. These are important tools. We should be using them.””

Let Fallen Trees Lie→

Tom Spears, reporting for the Ottawa Citizen:

Macomb Paynes; Flickr

“Jereme Gaeta and his research group at the University of Wisconsin were studying what biologists call coarse woody habitat — trees that die and fall into the water near shore, where they become waterlogged and sink. Property owners often get rid of these slimy old logs. They get in the way of swimmers and boats. They look messy.

But Gaeta’s team says it’s better to let fallen logs lie. This is going to do bad things to fish. In their little lake just south of Lake Superior, the Wisconsin group watched as species either became more rare or disappeared completely. “When lake levels go down,” Jereme Gaeta says in a news release, “they lose all that refuge, so they’re pretty much forced to live in the foraging arena, where they’re directly interacting with their predators — in our case largemouth bass.” He said the vulnerability of the small fish goes “through the roof.””

Drought-driven lake level decline: effects on coarse woody habitat and fishes by Jereme W. Gaeta, Greg G. Sass, Stephen R. Carpenter

People Post Pictures of Clear-Water Lakes More Than Turbid Lakes→

Roberta Kwok, writing for Conservation Magazine:

Shutterstock

“People were more likely to visit bigger lakes with clearer water, the researchers report in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. For every additional meter of water clarity, visitors drove nearly an hour longer to get to and from the lake, spending about $22 more in travel costs. Lakes with boat ramps also were more popular.

The study authors estimate that improving a lake’s clarity by one meter would bump up the average number of visits by 1,389 per year. The overall number of lake visits in a region might not increase, since the number of people travelling to the murkier lakes could drop. But if people opted to visit a lake rather than, say, a pool, the total number of visits could rise.”

Recreational demand for clean water: evidence from geotagged photographs by visitors to lakes By Bonnie L Keeler, Spencer A Wood, Stephen Polasky, Catherine Kling, Christopher T Filstrup, and John A Downing

Lake Champlain: Phosphorus Diet→

John Herrick, reporting for VTDigger:

Malcolm K.

“Vermont’s plan to improve Lake Champlain’s water quality does not go far enough to comply with federal regulations, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA released phosphorus pollution reduction targets for Lake Champlain at a meeting in Middlebury on Monday. It also ran a model of the phosphorus reduction plan Vermont submitted in May to determine whether it would meet federal standards.

Stephen Perkins, director of ecosystem protection for the EPA’s Boston office, pointed to an up-sloping trend line showing the amount of phosphorus in several segments of Lake Champlain.

“The phosphorus levels are too high in many portions of the lake,” he told the crowd of farmers, water quality advocates and state officials. “It’s going to take an awful lot of work to take those red trend lines and get them to bend down in a different direction.””

The phosphorus clouds everything. Quantified must your diet be before reaching it you can.

Prevent, Not Simply Treat, Lake Michigan Pollution→

Rahm Emanuel and Mark Tercek, writing in the Chicago Sun Times:

James Marvin Phelps

“The world’s cities spend roughly $90 billion per year on infrastructure to move and treat water. This price tag is increasing as urban populations grow, infrastructure ages, and our changing climate continues to turn once-reliable rainfall into periods of more severe drought and floods.

We spend billions to clean water, but do comparatively little to prevent it from getting polluted in the first place.

Delivering clean and reliable water may be the single largest challenge that our growing cities face. The good news: we have a significant opportunity right now to turn this trend around. Investing in nature can reduce the amount of nutrient and sediment pollution in our natural water sources, before costly chemical treatment is required.”

This will be a very important test for politicians.

Unalaska Lake Needs Help→

Annie Ropeik, reporting for KUCB:

Wanetta Ayers

“Residents ask the City to fix lake pollution. The Unalaska Lake watershed is prime spawning ground for salmon in the heart of the city’s historic downtown. It’s also some of the least healthy habitat in the Aleutian Islands.

But residents’ concerns went beyond the scope of the grant. They say it’s the city’s push for development that’s harmed the lake. And city manager Chris Hladick said after the meeting that’s not a problem he can solve with just a million dollars.

”We realize that the money isn’t going to be a huge amount ... so the planning effort is really important for the long-term,” he says. “We’re heightening this issue to another level to let contractors or whatever know, hey, we’ve gotta get our act together.”

Hladick’s hoping the grant will spur some planning for stormwater management that the city should have done years ago. ”

Already know you that which you need. Blaming each other does not get the work done. Each must do their part. Stormwater management and restoring shoreline vegetation and wetlands. Save you it can.

Phosphorus Pollution Cap and Trade→

Peter Hirschfeld, reporting for Vermont's NPR News Source:

TAYLOR DOBBS VPR

“The clean-up of Lake Champlain looms as perhaps the largest, and most expensive environmental challenge facing Vermont. And state officials are exploring whether a cap-and-trade program for phosphorus runoff might help solve the problem.

“And the theory is that it becomes more economically efficient overall, if you look across the whole sector, that you’re making the best possible investments, the most cost-effective investments, to reduce pollution,” says David Mears, commissioner of the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation.

The approach has its critics, but the EPA credits the Acid Raid Program with nearly halving the amount of sulfur dioxide pumped annually into the atmosphere. And Mears wonders whether the same kind of framework might help curb the flow of phosphorus into the most polluted areas of Lake Champlain.

“The idea of using the markets as a way of driving and incentivizing further pollution reduction is an enticing one,” Mears says. “It has worked in other scenarios. It’s still relatively unproven in the context of nutrient pollution into waters.””

Control, control, you must learn control! Use the market force Luke.

Lake Polluted, Politicians Talk, Now What?→

Dan Egan, reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Dan Egan, Journal Sentinel

“When Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel first ran for Congress in 2002, he vowed that protecting the Great Lakes would be high on his agenda. The primary concerns at the time were environmental damage wrought by invasive species such as zebra mussels, as well as urban and industrial pollutions.

Twelve years and three jobs later — Emanuel went from Congress to chief of staff for President Barack Obama before becoming mayor of Chicago in 2011 — the Great Lakes have received some $1.6 billion in federal restoration funds.

Yet despite all of that money earmarked for things like combating the spread of invasive species, cleaning up toxic hot spots and restoring wetlands, Emanuel said Wednesday that the world’s largest freshwater system has just entered an era of unprecedented peril.”

To be Jedi is to face the truth, and choose. Provide solutions, or avoid challenges, Padawan. Be a candle, or the night.

Sauk River Chain of Lakes Face Pollution →

Kirsti Marohn, reporting for the St. Cloud Times:

Kimm Anderson, St. Cloud Times

“An active watershed district and lake association have taken ambitious steps to curb pollution entering the lakes. By most accounts, the lakes’ clarity has vastly improved and fish are more abundant. “The condition of the chain was dramatically worse water quality than it currently is,” said Greg Van Eeckhout, environmental specialist with the MPCA.

But the chain still faces many challenges. It’s fed by the Sauk River, which drains a huge area of largely agricultural land. Most of the chain’s lakes are considered impaired because of high nutrient levels. Algae blooms still make the water murky at times. The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency is proposing new standards for the lake that would aim to reduce those nutrient levels and improve the clarity of the water. But one environmental group says the standards are too lenient.

As the debate over the Sauk Chain’s future heats up, nearly everyone seems to agree that much progress has been made in the past few decades.”

If no mistake have you made, yet losing you are … a different game you should play. Change standards without changing system, skeptical we are.

Aral Sea - A Large Lake No More→

Enjoli Liston, writing for the Guardian:

NASA

Aral Sea

“Images from the US space agency’s Terra satellite released last week show that the eastern basin of the Central Asian inland sea – which stretched across Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and was once the fourth largest in the world – was totally parched in August. Images taken in 2000 show an extensive body of water covering the same area.

“This is the first time the eastern basin has completely dried in modern times,” Philip Micklin, a geographer emeritus from Western Michigan University told Nasa. “And it is likely the first time it has completely dried in 600 years, since Medieval desiccation associated with diversion of Amu Darya to the Caspian Sea.”

In the 1950s, two of the region’s major rivers – the Amu Darya and and the Syr Darya – were diverted by the Soviet government to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, starving the Aral. It has been diminishing ever since, with the sea level dropping 16 metres between 1960 and 1996, according to the World Bank. Water levels are believed to be down to less than 10 per cent of what they were five decades ago.”

If into the image recordings you go, only pain will you find.

History of Lake Itasca, Source of the Mississippi River→

Steven Penick, writing for MinnPost:

Randen Pederson, Flickr

“The Itasca forest during the late nineteenth century contained towering pines and numerous lakes. Individuals like surveyor Jacob Brower became captivated by the region and the wildlife that inhabited it. They recognized that the economic potential of northern Minnesota would change its landscape. Their effort to preserve Lake Itasca led them to contend with the lumber industry, public interests, and the politics that weaved between them.

People have long appreciated Lake Itasca’s beauty and resources. Some eight thousand years ago indigenous hunters left spears at a bison kill site in the area. Around 1200 CE the Blackduck people created a village there, eventually leaving remnants of their unique pottery behind. Ojibwe groups have lived in the lake’s vicinity since the 1700s.

The U.S. government slowly began turning their attention to the region after buying Louisiana Territory from France in 1803. In 1832 the Ojibwe leader Ozaawindib brought Henry Schoolcraft to Omushkos Lake and the Mississippi headwaters. Schoolcraft renamed the lake Itasca by combining the Latin words veritas (truth) and caput (head).”

On many long journeys have I gone. And waited, too, for others to return from journeys of their own. Some return; some are broken; some come back so different only their names remain. Be brave, Lake Itasca go you must.

Polluters Don't Pay→

Chad Selweski, reporting for The Macomb Daily:

“Two days after Oakland County officials admitted that they dumped an unprecedented 2.1 billion gallons of partially treated sewage into the Macomb County waterways during the massive Aug. 11 storm, environmental activists on Thursday called for a return to the policing of polluters that was in place several years ago.

These activists warned that drenching rainstorms are becoming more common, and sewage system overflows packed with fertilizers and other “nutrient-rich” discharges will increasingly lead to a Lake St. Clair shoreline plagued by algae, tainted water and seaweed-style aquatic plants dominating the water surface.”

The polluted Red Run Drain in Warren

Once you start down the dark path of mixing sewage with storm runoff, forever will it dominate your destiny, consume you it will.

Agricultural Runoff is Polluting the Lake→

Tom Henry, reporting for The Blade:

“Jeff Reutter, the Ohio Sea Grant and Ohio State University Stone Laboratory director, frequently makes this point to groups hearing any one of the dozens of presentations he makes each year: More than two-thirds of today’s phosphorus in western Lake Erie comes from agricultural runoff. In the 1960s, more than two-thirds of it came from poor sewage treatment...

While people in Toledo may think of Lake Erie water quality as a sewage or factory issue, it is increasingly an agricultural land-use issue. The Maumee River watershed — the largest and the most important for western Lake Erie — is 73 percent agricultural land, Ms. Johnson said.

Mr. Reutter and other officials have been part of a state task force studying the phosphorus problem, which — to no one’s surprise — generally has been trending upward since 1995, when the first major bloom of toxic microcystis algae was detected in western Lake Erie since the 1970s.

One exception was during the drought of 2012. That, according to Mr. Reutter, only amplifies the strong correlation between agricultural runoff and western Lake Erie algae. In its latest report, the task force called for a 40 percent reduction in farm runoff.”

Powerful the agricultural interests have become, the dark side I sense in them.

Great Lakes at a Crossroads→

Dan Egan, reporting for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel 

“Despite their vastness, for thousands of years the inland seas above Niagara Falls were as isolated from the outside world as a Northwoods Wisconsin pond. That all changed in 1959. The U.S. and Canadian governments obliterated the lake’s natural barrier to invasive fish, plants, viruses and mollusks with the construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway, a system of channels, locks and dams that opened the door for ocean freighters to sail up the once-wild St. Lawrence River, around Niagara Falls and into the heart of the continent.

Small boats had access to the lakes since the 1800s thanks to relatively tiny man-made navigation channels stretching in from the East Coast and a canal at Chicago that artificially linked Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River basin.

But the consequences of opening a nautical freeway into the Great Lakes for globe-roaming freighters proved disastrous — at least 56 non-native organisms have since been discovered in the lakes, and the majority arrived as stowaways in freighter ballast tanks.”

New species additions are a natural part of ecosystem life. Rejoice for those around you and admire the beauty of all organisms. Mourn a changed ecosystem do not. Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealously.

Lake Erie is Polluted→

Behind Toledo’s Water Crisis, a Long-Troubled Lake Erie
By Michael Wines, The New York Times:

Haraz N. Ghanbari/AP

“It took a serendipitous slug of toxins and the loss of drinking water for a half-million residents to bring home what scientists and government officials in this part of the county have been saying for years: Lake Erie is in trouble, and getting worse by the year.

Flooded by tides of phosphorus washed from fertilized farms, cattle feedlots and leaky septic systems, the most intensely developed of the Great Lakes is increasingly being choked each summer by thick mats of algae, much of it poisonous. What plagues Toledo and, experts say, potentially all 11 million lakeside residents, is increasingly a serious problem across the United States.

But while there is talk of action — and particularly in Ohio, real action — there also is widespread agreement that efforts to address the problem have fallen woefully short. And the troubles are not restricted to the Great Lakes. Poisonous algae are found in polluted inland lakes from Minnesota to Nebraska to California, and even in the glacial-era kettle ponds of Cape Cod in Massachusetts.”

If you don't advance new pollution control efforts now — if you choose the quick and easy path — you will become an agent of darkness.

Straits of Mackinac Oil Pipeline Failure Would be Disastrous→

Keith Matheny, reporting for Detroit Free Press: 

ThiloG: Flickr.com

“A rupture of 61-year-old, underwater oil pipelines running through the Straits of Mackinac would be “the worst possible place” for a spill on the Great Lakes, with catastrophic results, according to a University of Michigan researcher studying potential impacts of a spill.

David Schwab, a research scientist at the U-M Water Center, retired from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where he studied Great Lakes water flows and dynamics for more than 30 years. He’s the author of a new study done in collaboration with the National Wildlife Federation looking at different scenarios for potential oil spills in the Straits from Canadian oil transport giant Enbridge’s Line 5.

“I can’t think — in my experience — of another place on the Great Lakes where an oil spill would have as wide an area of impact, in as short of time, as at the Straits of Mackinac,” Schwab said.

Line 5 is a set of two oil pipelines that runs from Superior, Wis., through the Upper Peninsula, underwater through the Straits and then down through the Lower Peninsula before connecting to a hub in Sarnia, Ontario. The lines transport about 23 million gallons of oil and other petroleum products, such as natural gas liquids, through the Straits daily.”

Pain, suffering, death I feel would happen. Something terrible may happen. Terrible pain for this Black Swan.

Lake Erie Pollution→

Layla Klamt, writing for Liberty Voice:

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released its forecast on Lake Erie’s summer algae bloom for 2014 this week, and at first glance, the numbers are alarming. NOAA and the International Joint Commission say that even though pollutants causing the algae bloom in Lake Erie are high, they are still on the decline from 2011.

Lake Erie is the smallest and shallowest of all five Great Lakes and also has the most river tributaries. Ohio, New York and Ontario, Canada share its borders, and Lake Erie is seen as a vital economic waterway, a source for drinking water and a valuable sewer treatment. The lake has been plagued by many ecological problems since the late 60s, including the toxic algae blooms, a number of invasive species and high levels of Mercury in its edible fish supply. Unfortunately because of all these problems, Lake Erie has come to be known as an environmental sore spot for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the NOAA. Efforts to clean up the lake’s shores and protect species have thus seemed like an uphill battle at times.”

Powerful the pollution consequences become, the dark side I sense in them.