One path near Lake Superior connects the native community of Keweenaw Bay, Michigan, with the rest of the state. During the heavy rains, rocks and wood litter the route and interrupt the round trips. During the summer, drivers must take a 30-minute detour; In winter, the trip can take more than two hours. The work teams eventually lead the way with plowed machines, thus freeing the movement of the tribe.
Living at the southern tip of Superior, Keweenaw Bay Indian Community (KBIC) manages about 19 miles from its coastline. They depend on it to earn income from tourism, clean water and fishing from the tribal hatchery. A full lake is good news for KBIC, but if the levels overflow, it could threaten residents' livelihoods.
This precarious balance turned into a disaster during fathers day flood 2018, when more than seven inches of rain hit the area in just three hours. After the storm, fecal runoff plagued local beaches, causing an explosion of damage E. coli bacteria Michigan Department of Health closed several places to swim in the upper peninsula of the state, but they did not offer to prove the domination of the tribe. This led KBIC water resources specialist Stephanie Cree to take matters into her own hands. After all, the health of Lake Superior is an essential measure when people's livelihoods depend on it.
Related Downloads:
"A large part of the community depends on fish for food," says Cree. "We have many tribal and commercial fishermen who depend on fishing for their income."
Cree instituted weekly beach monitoring to check bacteria levels, and then closed two of the beaches on the reserve. To his knowledge, this was the first closure of its kind in modern history in Keweenaw Bay. AND probably won't be the last, because the region becomes more unstable every day.
On the 5,241 miles of the Great Lakes coast, tribes, cities, tourists and wildlife managers face devastating floods and erosion. It is a different story from the coasts of the country, where the rising sea crawls inland at a brisk pace. Instead, the five Great Lakes fluctuate naturally with the season, although in the past four decades they have rebounded above and below historical records. Experts suspect that climate change is partly behind these changes, but due to the complex nature of water, it is difficult to isolate human factors from the rest of the turbulence . This leaves states like Michigan with little room to prepare for the next turn in the lakes.
To understand how much the Great Lakes have grown, we have to go back to 1860, when the US Army Corps of Engineers. United States started taking monthly averages of water levels. Based on these measurements, the lakes remained in a modest six-foot range from their typical levels. But the pic model requires more attention.
Because September 2014, the largest collection of freshwater on the planet has broken and broken most of its long-term records. Last June and July, Lakes Superior, Erie, Ontario and "the sixth great lake", St. Clair, everything passed above the summits of the centenary. Meanwhile, Lakes Michigan and Huron reach new heights in April after an exceptionally wet winter it pushed its levels three feet above the monthly average.
Some of these models are inherent in the cycles that shape the Great Lakes, says Chin Wu, an engineer at the University of Wisconsin, who worked with the Army Corps of Engineers and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). to study the system. Basin levels generally rise in spring with heavy precipitation and runoff of melted snow. They continue to increase in the middle of summer, as the warmer temperatures cause a slight expansion of the water molecules, before falling in the fall, as the cold air accelerates evaporation.
"The Great Lakes are very complex," says Wu. "It's not like the simple formula for ocean levels, which continue to rise."
The recent series of record highs relates directly to the extreme ice caps of 2013, 2014 and 2015, said Greg Mann, manager of science and operations for the NOAA weather forecast office. Competitive atmospheric processes, such as evaporation and precipitation, generally maintain the balance of the Great Lakes system, he notes, but when one of these reactions does not go as planned , water builds up too quickly. This is exactly what happened Polar Vortex 2014, when the area has frozen and evaporation has been affected. Months later, the ice melted on the lakes, as did heavy spring rains arrival.
The reverse is also true, says Mann: A decrease in precipitation and low ice cover can speed up evaporation, leading to low levels. In fact, before the recent stretch of peaks, the Great Lakes experienced their longest period of down-average waters. In the spring of 2013, Lakes Huron and Michigan reached the lowest point of any 15 years of decline, a challenge for sectors such as shipping and hydroelectricity.
Strange weather phenomena that feed on already dangerously high waters are less well understood. Meteosunami will materialize randomly in the Great Lakes, lasting between a few minutes and two hours. The waves caused by the storm they usually reach a maximum of one foot, but can still cause significant damage; in 1954 an abnormally high meteorite hit the coast of Chicago and killed seven people.
Looking back at all of the dramatic ups and downs of the past decade, it seems impossible to project the future of the tides. The best bet is to dig deep into the data and predict a wide range of outcomes for each lake. Currently, researchers from NOAA and the Canadian Hydrographic Service are tracking the smallest changes in water levels with measurement stations located in the five Great Lakes (There are 53 in total in the United States) Devices filled with sensors allow scientists to closely monitor the amount of water entering and leaving the basin. This in itself is a difficult task: Lakes Michigan and Huron take on average only Runoff and precipitation of 139 Olympic swimming pools per minute.
From this data, experts can try to find out if climate change is disrupting the Great Lakes system, even if they still won't be able to establish strong correlations. The studios have Climate change is already linked to changes in local precipitation levels. Annual rain and snow totals in the region have shot down by 13.6 percent since 1951, and until last October, the Great Lakes experienced his fifth wettest year in a row
. The coming decades could make it even wetter winters and springs.
In addition, the region is losing strips of frozen land, as is the Arctic. Recent NOAA maps show the total ice cap in the basin reduced by 69 percent between 1973 and 2017, a trend that could be related to warmer water temperatures in summer. Less ice means more waves hitting the ground, causing erosion on the beaches of Chicago and coastal villages. In January, a cabin in Battle Creek, Michigan, It collapsed on a cliff and collapsed in the waves, a tragedy that could signal the new normal of life in front of the lake.
Overall, the longest freshwater coast in the country. it's not what in the old days. Parts of the Michigan coast are eroding an average of one foot per yearand the state has spent millions of dollars Restoration of damage in camps, dunes and beaches.
There is also symbolic importance anchored on the shores of Michigan. Locals take ownership and champion the protection of the Great Lakes, says Nick Assendelft, chief information officer for the Michigan Department of the Environment, Great Lakes and Energy. "It is in Michiganders DNA to have a connection with water."
Michigan officials monitor development in high risk erosion areasAlthough only 10% of the state's coastline is currently under this protection, says Richard Norton, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan. Meanwhile, some residents are trying to save their homes by the lake by installing rocks or steel. dikes to protect against rising waves. It can cost homeowners up to $ 150,000 depending on the material and size of the property, says Beth Foley, a Michigan real estate agent specializing in oceanfront homes. In particularly dangerous areas, people have even collected their homes and dragged them several meters from the lake.
In addition to being inexpensive, levees and other protective measures can neutralize each other by redirecting the waves so as to accelerate erosion. Wu, the engineer from the University of Wisconsin, also says that they eat in premium coastal habitat by agitating the waters that move the sand from the shallow waters. In this spirit, researchers are looking for "soft" solutions that are not limited to Great Lakes communities, in particular "living ribs”Made from natural materials like flora, rocks and oysters. The idea is far from new: Indigenous communities about the ball Vegetation is traditionally used to control erosion, and the cities of Washington, North Carolina, New York and Alabama already use non-rigid shock absorbers.
For the Indian community of Keweenaw Bay, hard and soft solutions work together. The tribe hired a company to install rocks and a loose stone base called riprap around their service station on Lake Superior. And for more than a decade, the natural resources department has led restoration efforts such as planting native herbs as a screen around local soils and wetlands. These measures also increase the habitats of birds and butterflies, a mutual benefit for the upper ecosystem.
Ultimately, the stakes are high for KBIC. Tribes most valuable assets They are based in and around the lake, both on fishing and on the sand that houses centuries-old cemeteries and historically important plants. When floods pour onto roads, they not only endanger the economic well-being of the community, but also threaten its cultural importance.
To go forward, no one knows what the lake waters will do. They could increase and decrease as they have done over the last century, with slight deviations from global and regional warming. cold snaps. says Eric Anderson, physical oceanographer at the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory at NOAA. But unlike the accelerating sea level rise, Great Lakes levels are unlikely to follow a clear path.
In the short term, the Army Corps of Engineers predict a wide range of results for each lake. Overall, they expect a similar situation in the lakes over the next six months, says John Allis, district office manager for Great Hydrology and Hydrology in Detroit. "We will face record levels or just below them."
How to manage these summits is a complex question in itself. Take the example of KBIC: Father's Day your natural resources department to organize a plan for future emergencies (a mandatory item to compete for federal disaster funding). Cree, your water expert, believes neighboring tribes can do the same.
"It's brand new," she says. "We have never had this type of problem before because storms occur more frequently."
In 2018, the tribe began to develop a pre-hazard mitigation plan to address current concerns such as record water levels, extreme storms, infrastructure issues and climate change , explains Dione Price, environmental specialist at KBIC. They hope to adopt it for this summer.
And while the models of the Corporation of Army Engineers can give communities a clue of what to expect, the region's future cannot be determined by a curve on a graphic. To really understand what is happening at local water levels, Mann, the NOAA operations officer, says that people need to appreciate the ins and outs of the Great Lakes. Heating and cooling do not pull all the chains in the system; natural cycles like rain and evaporation either. "It is almost impossible to predict the results with certainty," says Mann. "I know it's not satisfactory, but that's how it works."