Two Great Lakes at shallowest levels ever recorded
November 2012 photo shows white streaks on steel breakwall that shows the normal water level on Portage Lake at Onekama, Mich., which is connected by a channel to Lake Michigan. Levels across much of the Great Lakes are abnormally low. / AP
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich Two of the Great Lakes have hit their lowest water levels ever recorded, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Tuesday, capping more than a decade of below-normal rain and snowfall and higher temperatures that boost evaporation.
Measurements taken last month show Lake Huron and Lake Michigan have reached their lowest ebb since record keeping began in 1918, and the lakes could set additional records over the next few months, the corps said. The lakes were 29 inches below their long-term average and had declined 17 inches since January 2012.
The other Great Lakes, Superior, Erie and Ontario, were also well below average.
"We're in an extreme situation," said Keith Kompoltowicz, watershed hydrology chief for the corps district office in Detroit.
The low water has caused heavy economic losses by forcing cargo ships to carry lighter loads, leaving boat docks high and dry, and damaging fish-spawning areas. And vegetation has sprung up in newly exposed shoreline bottomlands, a turnoff for hotel customers who prefer sandy beaches.
The corps' report came as shippers pleaded with Congress for more money to dredge ever-shallower harbors and channels. Shippers are taxed to support a harbor maintenance fund, but only about half of the revenue is spent on dredging. The remainder is diverted to the treasury for other purposes. Legislation to change that policy is pending before Congress.
"Plunging water levels are beyond anyone's control, but the dredging crisis is man-made," said James Weakley, president of the Cleveland-based Lake Carriers' Association.
Kompoltowicz said the Army corps might reconsider a long-debated proposal to place structures in a river to reduce the flow of water away from Lakes Huron and Lake Michigan, which are connected.
Scientists say lake levels are cyclical and controlled mostly by nature. They began a steep decline in the late 1990s and have usually lagged well below their historical averages since then.
But studies have shown that Huron and Michigan fell by 10 to 16 inches because of dredging over the years to deepen the navigational channel in the St. Clair River, most recently in the 1960s. Dredging of the river, which is on the south end of Lake Huron, accelerated the flow of water southward from the two lakes toward Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, and eventually into the Atlantic Ocean.
Groups representing shoreline property owners, primarily in Lake Huron's Georgian Bay, have demanded action to slow the Lake Huron and Michigan outflow to make up for losses that resulted from dredging, which they contend are even greater than officials have acknowledged.
Although the Army corps produced a list of water-slowing options in 1972, including miniature dams and sills that resemble speed bumps along the river bottom, nothing was done because the lakes were in a period of above-average levels that lasted nearly three decades, Kompoltowicz said.
The corps has congressional authorization to take action but would need money for an updated study as a first step, he said. The Detroit office is considering a funding request, but it would have to compete with other projects nationwide and couldn't get into the budget before 2015.
"It's no guarantee that we're going to get it, especially in this budget climate," Kompoltowicz said. "But there are serious impacts to navigation and shoreline property owners from this extreme event. It's time to revisit this."
Scientists and engineers convened by the International Joint Commission, a U.S.-Canadian agency that deals with shared waterways, issued reports in 2009 and last year that did not endorse trying to regulate the Great Lakes by placing structures at choke points such as the St. Clair River. The commission has conducted public hearings and will issue a statement in about a month, spokesman John Nevin said.
Roger Gauthier, a retired staff hydrologist with the Army corps, said a series of "speed bumps" could be put in the river at a reasonable cost within a few years. Without such measures, he warned, it "would take years of consistent rain" to return Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to normal.
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This Holy Earth:
Thou shall inherit this Holy Earth as a Faithful Steward, respecting, protecting and conserving its Environment, its Resources and its Productivity for future generations. Thou shall safeguard its Fields from erosion; its Soils and sub-Surface from Chemical Saturation; its ocean waters, its ground waters and its air from chemical pollution; its Oceans from over fishing; its Forests from desolation; its Mineral Resources from depletion; its Hills from overgrazing by thy herds and its Creatures from extinction. ALL OF THIS SO THAT THY DESCENDANTS MAY ENJOY ITS ABUNDANCE AS ONCE DID THEE.
As all Nations do share in the Ownership of this Holy Earth. Ergo, if any Nation or its leaders should fail in the responsibilities of their Stewardship, then all of thy crop land shall become dry and sterile ground with wasting gullies -all combining to portend a Greater potential for a Famine; thy waters unfit to drink; thy air too thick to breath; the meat of thy herds and thy flocks, as the spawn of thy waters and thy oceans, unfit to eat; and storms and rising ocean tides shall devastate thy landscape. If any of the above should come to pass, then thy descendants shall gradually diminish in their number and eventually depart in their entirety from off the face of this Holy Earth.
Why? Because man cannot continue to "Gut" the sub-surface of its Oil, Coal and other mineral resources without expecting the voids that remain to fill back in at some point in time. Nor can he continue to treat this Earth like it's his own PRIVATE, PROFIT- GENERATING PLAYGROUND, driven by Sociopathic GREED, without expecting the Earth and its Environment to retaliate!
Why? Because insatiable, sociopathic, corporate, GREED and ignorance of their ignorance of all things except their "Bottom Line" shall have decreed it so.
Corporate "PROFITS" and a "Clean Environment" are not, and never will be, compatible. Corporate Credo -to which their sycophants subscribe: "Rather no Planet at all than a Planet where our insatiable, sociopathic GREED cannot be satisfied. Restrictions, Safety Regulations and the Environment be Damned!"
Tom Nass
5th Marine Division - WWII
Your projection is obvious for all to see. The only person that has been blaming everybody else is President Obama himself and his followers.
Now you go ash (sic) a polar bear!
The biggest change they made was change how water flowed. Before water was directed much like North America. They learned that it was a BIG mistake and as a result created buffer zones. Large levies were created about 500 to one KM on either side of a major waterway (where possible). Within the buffer zones the water was allowed to do what it did best namely create nature. The results are startling, in that nature returns and lost species reappear. AND of course the floods and dangers dramatically reduce. It has been a success through and through.
The Great lakes have a bigger problem namely they will probably have to undo about 20 years of real estate development to get back to normal. Yes nature plays a role, but so do humans. But hey not much will happen until there is nothing left and then it will be too late.
It is just a ten-yer, ever increasing loss of fresh water exactly co-incident with the most significant and sustained rise in global temperature, ever.