Politically brighter Congressmen might see such a repeal not as a one-off special event, but instead as a precedent for further "inter-state resource raids". Some of which raids could target their own states. So - support for that repeal might prove scarcer than you'd think, from just looking at a map of drought-plagued areas of the U.S. Also - burning needs for water tend to be sudden & immediate things. Vs. designi…
> Politically brighter Congressmen might see such a repeal not as a one-off special event, but instead as a precedent for further "inter-state resource raids". You could say the same about Texas's abortion private bounty hunting bill. Doesn't seem to have stopped them.
That's because no other state has yet passed a law allowing that kind of bounty hunting of Texas political bodies.
"They hold more than a fifth of Earth’s unfrozen fresh water" I read quite a few stories about the horrible drought in the west, and here I am sitting on a good part of all the usable water in the entire world. I can't help but think at some point a bunch of people are going to come for that water, in one way or another. Either by moving here, or trying to move it there. Some ideas have been floating around about tha…
The region adjacent to the lakes is not immune to drought. There were widespread crop failures a few years ago.
Seas or not, I love the lakes and the land around them, in the 20+ years since I moved myself here they've taken over my heart. I'm from the aspen parkland of central Alberta; thin trees, dry air, small muddy leach-infested kettle lakes, big skies, poplar and birch land. When I was 8 we did a trip across Canada, and I remember us camping by the shores of Superior when a massive thunderstorm came rolling in, and it le…
I've never spent considerable time around the lakes, but I do have a Great Lakes experience that I think back to often. Right after college, I was floating in life a bit pre-grad school, and I took a trip from home (Pennsylvania) out to Vegas, to drive with my cousin who was getting stationed in Virginia, and didn't want to make the drive alone.
I connected through O'hare, and when flying into Chicago, being on the right side of the plane I got a great view of the bottom of Lake Michigan from the air. As we cruised along the southern coast making our approach, that distance between the two sides of the lake with Chicago on the East really stuck in my head, and I realized I now have a measurable mental image of a chunk of the earth's surface, that is large enough to be on a globe, but small enough to take in, and relate to things at human scale, like boats, or the buildings of Chicago.
I use that reference pretty often when looking at maps/globes and trying to get a handle of sizes and distances, like "Oh, that's just three Lake Michigans' wide".
We are blessed in Ontario to have the first and second longest freshwater beaches in the world. On Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay and Lake Huron proper respectively. Nothing recharges your batteries like a day in the sun, by the great un-briny. A few clandestine cans of beer, a fruit salad and a little bit of the sticky green stuff: heaven.
The water is so unbelievably clear. And believably cold.
>> The water is so unbelievably clear. And believably cold.
According to a friend, it is the best shipwreck diving in the world. The lack of salt and cold water means 100 year old ships are still preserved in great shape, often visible from the surface. IIRC there is a glass-bottomed boat ride on Superior that goes over a couple of them.
Interestingly (to me anyway) I was just following the news about Lake Powell being at a very low level, and noticed on a map just how "non-lake like" its shape is (even when at full capacity).... it just looks like a river and tributaries that are somewhat wider than they were before a dam was built.
As usual the discussion pretends to be about the thing, when it's actually about the semantics.
The Great Lakes are measured, mapped, sounded and recorded. We know an awful lot about them, and that hasn't changed lately.
The discussion isn't about them. It's about the definition of 'sea' and 'lake'.
Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario are still there and whatever they are, they're doing it now.
It is indeed mostly semantics. Interestingly (to me anyway) I was just following the news about Lake Powell being at a very low level, and noticed on a map just how "non-lake like" its shape is (even when at full capacity).... it just looks like a river and tributaries that are somewhat wider than they were before a dam was built. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+Powell/@37.0518007,-1... Meanwhile, why is Green…
Australia has 3x the land area as Greenland so the line is probably somewhere in between there.
"They hold more than a fifth of Earth’s unfrozen fresh water" I read quite a few stories about the horrible drought in the west, and here I am sitting on a good part of all the usable water in the entire world. I can't help but think at some point a bunch of people are going to come for that water, in one way or another. Either by moving here, or trying to move it there. Some ideas have been floating around about tha…
Water from the Great Lakes cannot leave the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes Compact prevents construction of any water withdrawal that will move water outside of the watershed. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact
While cute, interstate anything is the realm of the federal government. The moment water from the Great Lakes is needed elsewhere, it'll be sent there.
If you follow the case of the Parker dam, the conclusion of the Supreme Court was that it required congressional approval. It did not have that, but Arizona eventually allowed it anyways.
It seems like a no-true-scotsman problem. The examples of seas that are freshwater are dismissed as not actually seas since they're freshwater.
I thought I'd go with the same method as the article, using examples. I dismissed all the examples the article has given, and asked for better examples where we call a fresh water body a sea. I think we haven't and shouldn't. It's already confusing enough. Call all salty water bodies seas would be fine with me. But including non salty waters will only add to the confusion.
Well someone pointed out the Sea of Galilee (which is a lake, but then so is the Caspian Sea and the Dead Sea).
Yes, that's correct, it would increase its capacity by orders of magnitude, if not temporarily. The capacity of Lake Erie to hold water is set by the elevation of its outlet, which is currently about 174 m above sea level. Niagara Falls is a knickpoint in the Niagara river, and over time knickpoints in rivers are always smoothed out. This is why Niagara Falls is eroding upstream, and we spend money each year trying t…
Perhaps the missing component in understanding this is the time frame for draining Huron/Michigan into "River Erie". So Niagara is slowly eroding and will eventually reach a tipping point where further erosion will increase the rate of outflow from Erie. The increased outflow will increase the rate of erosion which will increase the rate of outflow, and so on. Correct? When this is happening, the rate of outflow from…
To be clear, I'm not saying that the draining of Lake Erie necessarily means that Lake Huron/Michigan or Superior would drain too. If that were to happen, the two events would be quite separate and likely separated by millennia. Lake Erie's water level will lower when/if the Niagara river erodes all the way back to to the outlet of Lake Erie, and Lake Erie will become a river, when it erodes all the way to the middle of the lake (actually the deepest part). Obviously, this event, should it happen at all, would be thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years from now, assuming that climate doesn't change such that the Great Lakes dry up, or that there isn't further geological activity/uplift. Would this draining of Erie result in a catastrophic flood when it does happen? I don't know, I suppose it depends on the erodability and topographic character of the outlet area at the time. But it is surely the case that the draining of Erie (i.e. the reduction in its capacity to store water) would result in an immediate but temporary increase in the flow through the Niagara river, as it conveys the regular flow from the upper Great Lakes as well as the additional storage loss of Erie. Once the river eroded to the deepest part of Erie, however, flow would resume to simply be controlled by the water delivered to the river by Huron. Would the river continue to erode to the outlet of Huron and result in a similar draining of the upper Great Lakes? I don't know, but I do know that would be over extensive geological time scales and that there is plenty of opportunity for climate change to have a great impact on this possible scenario--Erie draining is much more immediate by comparison. However, something that many Canadians like myself don't often realize, because we live in the country with the greatest number of lakes, is that lakes are generally not that common worldwide. They represent temporary landscape features that are reflective of a relatively recent (in geological terms) disturbance...in the case of most of Canada's lakes, a recent glaciation. Lakes eventually drain as their outlets are eroded down and fill in by sediment delivery from upstream. And the same will likely be true of all of the Great Lakes over a long enough time. There is nothing permanent about our landscapes and that's exactly what makes Earth so awesome as a planet. It's dynamic and varied and today's 'great' lakes can be tomorrow's dry desert plains. We may well be devastating this planet, and its ecosystems specifically, but in the long-view, we'll likely be nothing more than a blip in the history of Earth, and one that it will erase most evidence of after enough time. I don't know why, but there is something reassuring about that thought to me.