A Little Insight Into All Things Bailey

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Lake Erie

(Top: picture of the 5 Great Lakes from Space; Bottom: picture taken at Headlands Beach State Park in Mentor, OH)
I had fun writing that little informative post about the nuclear plant, so I decided to educate you all a little more, lol. Our house is about 2 miles away from Lake Erie. If you continue down our road, you actually dead end right into the lake. Many people don't know much about the Great Lakes, and I think in particular Lake Erie has gotten a bad reputation because of the pollution of the lake in the 60's and 70's. But it truly is a beautiful body of water, and I feel lucky to get to live so close to it!

Lake Erie is the eleventh largest lake in the world (by surface area). It is the fourth largest of the Great Lakes in surface area and the smallest by volume. Lake Erie has shores in Ontario, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan. It is the shallowest of the Great Lakes with an average depth of 62 feet and a maximum depth of 210 feet. For comparison, Lake Superior has an average depth of 483 feet! Because it is the shallowest, Lake Erie is also the warmest of the Great Lakes. The lake is named after the Erie tribe of Native Americans who lived along its southern shore.

Like the other Great Lakes, Erie produces lake effect snow when the first cold winds of winter pass over the warm waters, making Buffalo, New York and Erie, Pennsylvania the eleventh and thirteenth snowiest places in the entire United States respectively, according to data collected from the National Climatic Data Center. The lake effect ends or its effect is reduced, however, when the lake freezes over. Being the shallowest of the Great Lakes, it is the most likely to freeze and frequently does. On February 16, 2010, meteorologists reported that the lake had frozen over marking the first time the lake had completely frozen over since the winter of 1995-1996.

Lake Erie infamously became very polluted in the 1960s and 1970s as a result of the quantity of heavy industry situated in cities on its shores. The water quality deteriorated due to increasing levels of the nutrient phosphorous in both the water and lake bottom sediments. The resultant high nitrogen levels in the water caused algal blooms. Algae masses and fish kills increasingly fouled the shoreline during this period, but a 1969 Time magazine article about a fire on the Cuyahoga Rover, a tributary feeding the lake at Cleveland, Ohio, so embarrassed officials that the Congress quickly passed the Clean Water Act of 1972. In 1972 the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement between the United States and Canadian governments also significantly reduced the dumping and runoff of phosphorus into the lake. The lake has since become clean enough to allow sunlight to infiltrate its water and produce algae and sea weed, but a dead zone persists in the central Lake Erie basin during the late summer. Since the 1970s environmental regulation has led to a great increase in water quality and the return of economically important fish species and other biological life.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Erie

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