A normal lake, if
things get really rough, might tip a boat.
A Great Lake can swallow freighters almost three times the length of a
football field; the lakes' bottoms are littered with an estimated 6,000
shipwrecks.
Erosion has been
having its way with Niagara Falls. It is
expected the falls will disappear in about 50,000 years.
Chicago workers
reported within the month [July 1968] that they alone had disposed of enough
alewives [river herrings] to cover two football fields -- 500 feet high.
Winds churning deep
cold water from the bottom can drop Great Lakes temperatures by as much as 20
degrees in just a matter of minutes.
The current pulsing
through Lake St Clair is so strong that if you were to hop in an inflatable
raft at the top of the lake you'd flush out the other side in about two days --
without having to paddle a stroke.
In the early 1970s
two-thirds of America's lakes, rivers and coastal waters were unsafe for
fishing or swimming.
Lake Erie, which
holds only 2 percent of the overall volume of Great Lakes water, is home to
about 50 percent of Great Lakes fish.
Cleveland had
incorporated as a city just eight weeks before the Olin family pulled into town
behind their four horses. What struck
young Chauncey most about the place was not Clevelanders' industriousness but
the old-growth poplars with smokestack-like trunks so tall that their lowest
branches were still 70 feet off the ground.
[Lake] Superior's
temperature bump, for example, means on hot summer nights oceanographer [Jay]
Austin can take his boy swimming at a beach near downtown Duluth, something
most people would never do a generation ago because the lake stayed so cold
year-round that even summer swimmers risked hypothermia.
