Katherine

The Great Lakes Click on the title to go to Katherine's Website

The Great Lakes are the largest freshwater supply in the world. They have a complex history of shipwrecks, exploration, lighthouses, bridges, and more. they are full of fish, turtles, underwater plants, sea birds, all kinds of plants and animals. All the Lakes are fascinating places, and this is why I chose them to be my Independent Study Project. I have gone on vacation to the Great Lakes for every summer of my life, and have learned that they are huge and beautiful and generally fantastic. Unfortunately, the Great Lakes also have serious environmental problems. Since I love the Great Lakes, I thought I should learn about these problems, and I thought a good way to do that would be to do a project about the Lakes. I was encouraged by a lot of people who share my love of the Great Lakes, especially my parents. When I started this project, I hoped to learn many things. What I hoped to learn was divided into two categories: environment and history. I hoped to learn Lakes history in these categories: bridges, lighthouses, shipwrecks and exploration. I also hoped to learn quite a lot about environment in general. I ended up learning all about most of these subjects. I didn't learn about exploration very much, and the only bridge I learned about was the Mackinac bridge. Things turned out almost exactly as I expected. Doing research on the Great Lakes was extremely hard. Most internet Great Lakes sites were commercial ads. I did, however, find several good sites. I found few good books on the Great Lakes because most of them were on industry which I did not plan to be a big part of my project. My really good book resources came from the Great Inland Seas Maritime Museum in Vermillion, Ohio. Once I started organizing my information I realized that I had major gaps in my project. This caused the need to go back and fill the gaps before writing. While filling the gaps I had to reorganize my information in a completely different pattern which was very confusing but necessary. The Great Lakes were formed about one million years ago. Around that time the ice ages began. Glaciers advanced and retreated many times over the Great Lakes region. The glaciers were over one mile thick and so they carved huge basins in the land. When the glaciers began melting the water, called meltwater, filled the basins left by the glaciers. Years passed and nomadic tribes moved into the Great Lakes country to hunt for game and to benefit off of the fresh water. In the 1600's French voyageurs and missionaries filled the Great Lakes region. Fur trading began in the Great Lakes region and the region began to be settled. Because the Great Lakes had many natural resources shipping began. Unfortunately with shipping came shipwrecks. Whitefish Point is in Lake Superior. It is known as the "Graveyard of Ships" because more ships have been lost there than in any other part of Lake Superior. Although a lighthouse stands there it cannot save all of the ships. The first known ship to sail on Lake Superior was a trading ship, sixty feet, called the Invincible. Invincible sank in gale-force winds and towering waves near Whitefish Point in 1816. In 1905 a horrible storm hit Lake Superior. It combined snow, cold, wind, shipwreck, and heavy seas. It is agreed to be the worst storm ever to hit the Great Lakes. The temperature dropped to twelve degrees below zero and there was a terrible hurricane. Thirty ships were wrecked on Superior and some were thrown out of the water. Many Great Lakes ships survive terrible disasters and are salvaged and put back together to set sail again. An example of this is the Ann Arbor No. 4, a car ferry. This ship had a long history of disaster. It ran twice ashore near Kewaunee, Wisconsin, and once near Manitowoc. It capsized in Manistique Harbor in 1909. On the night of February 4, 1923, it ran into an eighty miles per hour snowstorm and coal cars on both sides threatened to wreck it. Still it managed to reach Frankfort Piers before it sank. All the crew was saved and it was salvaged the following spring. Perhaps one of the most famous of all Great Lakes shipwrecks is that of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald. It was seven hundred twenty-nine feet long and seventy-five feet wide. On November 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald left Superior, Wisconsin on a journey to Detroit, Michigan. The captain of the ship was Ernest McSorly, and there were twenty-nine crew members. The Edmund Fitzgerald carried 26,000 tons of iron ore pellets. Then a storm blew up that included sixty miles per hour winds and waves in excess of 15 feet. The Arthur M. Anderson, which was a ship within ten miles of the Edmund Fitzgerald, watched its radar screen. At 7:10 PM Captain McSorely delivered a message: "We're holding our own." The Edmund Fitzgerald now lies beneath five hundred fifty feet of Lake Superior. Many expeditions have been undertaken of the site and on July 5, 1995, the bell and stanchion were removed and a replica of the bell with the names of the crew engraved on it was left in its place. The original bell was given to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at Whitefish Point. Many shipwrecks have been prevented by lighthouses. For instance, the Whitefish Point light has shone unfailingly into Lake Superior, the largest of the great lakes, for nearly one hundred fifty years except for the night the Edmund Fitzgerald went down. It was first lit in 1849 and is the first light on Lake Superior other than that on Copper Harbor. It stands guard over the entrance of Whitefish Bay and is sometimes the only shelter for ships in the middle of a storm. The lighthouse marks the end of an eighty-mile stretch of shoreline called Lake Superiors' Shipwreck Coast. The Vermillion Lighthouse on Lake Erie was built in 1877. It was forty-five feet high, mounted on a concrete base with a four hundred foot catwalk. It no longer stands there. The Spectacle Reef light was eighty-six feet tall above the surface of Lake Huron. Workpeople braved severe gales and ice storms to complete it. Lightship #103 is the only surviving lightship on the Great Lakes. Lightships were floating lighthouses anchored in places where lighthouses could not be built. The Hurn, a lightship, was built in 1920 at a price of $147,428. It spent fifty years guiding vessels through dangerous shoals on the Great Lakes. It was the last lightship on the Great Lakes and it retired in 1970. In 1883 the United States Government purchased three and one-half acres from the Harbor Point Association to build a lighthouse. The Little Traverse Light was built in 1884. It consists of a two-story red brick tower. The lantern room with ten sides is painted white with a red roof. It holds a Fourth-Order Fresnel lens. It was manufactured by L. Sauttes Leminnie & Co. in Paris in 1881. A very rare fog-bell tower in addition was added in 1896. The lighthouse is not active and has been replaced by a sixty-two foot skeletal steel tower. The lighthouse is found on Harbor Point near Petosky, Michigan on Lake Michigan and marks the entrance to Little Traverse Bay. The Mackinac Bridge connects the upper and lower peninsulas of Michigan. It is located where the lakes Michigan and Huron meet, and it rises five hundred fifty-two feet above the Straits of Mackinac. 42,000 miles of steel wire was spun together to make the two main cables of the Mackinac Bridge. During the construction five people died. One diver surfaced too quickly and never recovered, one worker fell from a tower, and three iron workers fell from a catwalk collapse. The Mackinac Bridge was opened to the public on June 29, 1958, but the celebration was marred by fog and rain. Although the Golden Gate Bridge has a center span longer than Mackinac's, from foundation pier to foundation it is 2,164 feet shorter than Mackinac. Mackinac is 8,614 feet long and the Golden Gate Bridge is 6,450 feet long. The Mackinac Bridge is now more than forty years old and has witnessed some very sever weather. The original bridge architects and designers say that if the Mackinac Bridge is properly maintained the bridge will probably last for approximately one thousand years. Before Europeans came to the Great Lakes region the Great Lakes were mainly oligotraphic lakes. They supported high levels of animal life and prospered greatly. After the Europeans came the lakes became entrophication, and the ecological balance was significantly altered. Now heavy metals, pesticides, and toxins sit in the mud in Great Lakes rivers and harbors. One type of toxin, PBC's, are particularly harmful. They can cause animals to stop reproducing, they can cause animals to die, and they can cause severe deformities. PBC's and other contaminants are passed down from generation to generation of animals, including humans. Taking care of toxic sediments, which are toxic chemicals in the mud at the bottom of the Great Lakes, is a major problem. Some scientists think that the best solution is to leave them alone because dredging can just stir up the chemicals into the water. Others say that workers should incinerate or dump them. Scientists are beginning to work on a special type of new bacteria that would decompose and eliminate toxic sediments. The Grand Calumet River is one of forty-two chemical hot spots flowing into the Great Lakes. Thousands of sources make air pollution in the Great Lakes, including dumps, fires, smokestacks, and more. Lake trout were planted in Lake Michigan in the mid 1960's. All fish were from hatcheries. A decade later scientists still could not figure out why they had not started reproducing naturally. However, PBC's can cause fish to stop reproducing. Scientists study white rats to measure the effects of eating Great Lakes fish. In one experiment one group of rats was fed Lake Ontario salmon and the other group was fed Pacific Ocean fish. The rats who ate Lake Ontario salmon were shown to be unable to handle stress. Otherwise, they were the same as the Pacific Ocean fish rats. The same results were found in the Lake Ontario salmon rats' offspring. PBC's can cause cancer and can cause developmental defects. Children whose mothers have eaten Great Lakes fish in abundance have tested below average in intelligence, have a short-term memory, and have a short-term attention span. Double-crested cormorants, as a result of PBC's, started to lay eggs that had much thinner shells than originally. They started to be born with sever deformities and, after a while, started to stop reproducing altogether. Cormorants were born with sever ademict swilling around the head and neck, and their bodies were filled with PBC's. Scientists cut eggs open to explain dead nearly-developed embryos. Scientists band cormorants, cut off crossed bills, and examine eggs. One scientist, named James Ludwig, once said, "The problem in the Great Lakes is that we're losing diversity of species. Only the most persistent species survive. The more elegant species completely die out. The whole ecosystem shifts." Scientists also fly over bald eagle nesting sites in Michigan once a year. Bald eagles living within five miles of Lake Michigan breed normally for about two years, then stop reproducing. Scientists draw blood from nestlings. Then they band the nestlings. Scientists have studied the blood samples and have found that the blood is full of contaminants. Scientists trap young bald eagles in nets to study them. They band them, draw blood, and sometimes put satellite transmitters on them that are designed to fall off after a year. They then set it free, and with the transmitter they can often track and recapture the eagles. The scientists sometimes have to climb trees to get to the nestlings. A number of foreign species have entered the Great Lakes. In the 1950's the sea lamprey, a parasitic animal, worked its way up from the Atlantic and lowered the trout population. In 1957, scientists created a special chemical poison that would kill off sea lampreys but leave the rest of the ecosystem alone. The next foreign species to enter the Great Lakes was the Alewife fish, and by the thousands. Fortunately the salmon population mostly kept the Alewife population down. The newest foreign species threat is the Zebra Mussel, Dreissena Poymorphai, small fingernail-sized mussels native to the Caspian Sea of Asia. They are believed to have been taken to the Great Lakes through ballast water from a transoceanic vessel. The ballast water was dumped near the Great Lakes and eventually made their way into the Great Lakes. They were first discovered in the Great Lakes in the 1960's. One year after introduction their population was estimated at densities of 35,000 per square yard. Many scientists believe that the ecosystem changes caused by zebra mussels are more significant than changes caused by nutrient and toxic loadings combined. In the Great Lakes some bays have dead fish and algae everywhere. In 1969 an oil slick on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire. Soon after Life Magazine pronounced Lake Erie dead. Then on April 15, 1972, Canada's Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and USA's President Richard Nixon met to sign the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. This document committed Canada and the United States to help control Great Lakes pollution and cleaning up waste waters. After this great event Canada and the USA spent billions of dollars on sewage treatment plants. Since then the Great Lakes environment is making a comeback. One of Lake Michigan's recreation bays, Green Bay, kept getting more and more polluted. Now, however, the water quality has improved. Citizen cleanup workers have been involved in developing RAP's (Remedial Action Plans) to clean up in specific areas along the Great Lakes. Sport fishing is a popular pastime in the Great Lakes. Despite health warnings sport fishing has become a four billion dollar a year business in the Great Lakes. Some leaders in the sport fishing industry think that Great Lakes fish cannot hurt your body much if you are not strictly a fish eater. However, public health warnings have been put out that Great Lakes fish are harmful to the human body. Industry in the Great Lakes is growing. After World War II industry boomed. Industry in the Great Lakes can be either in manufacturing, chemical, and agricultural. Byproducts from factories and pesticides from farming made their way into the Great Lakes. The Great Lakes themselves became a great source of industrial transportation. Some resources that were shipped included iron ore pellets and raw steel. An incredible person I learned about while doing this project was Harriet Colfax. She was a first cousin of Schuyler Colfax, Vice President under President Ulysses S. Grant She was a music teacher in New York, New York. She was very independent and when the lighthouse keeper of the Michigan City, Indiana Lighthouses, John M. Clarkson, had to be replaced, she jumped at the chance and moved to Indiana. She won the job and, at the age of thirty-seven, on March 19, 1861 became a lighthouse keeper. She was given a uniform with pants which she refused to wear. She hired her friend, Mrs. Hartwell, as her personal assistant. She kept wonderful records and gained a reputation of efficiency. Harriet Colfax kept her job even when many female lighthouse keepers were losing their jobs. She wanted to stay in the lighthouse until her death but reluctantly accepted retirement on October 13, 1904. She was eighty. Harriet Colfax died in 1905. When I was learning about the Great Lakes I learned many things that are miscellaneous. For instance, I learned that the Great Lakes were larger just after they were formed than they are now. The shoreline of the Great Lakes helps to protect the inland around the Great Lakes. The shoreline of the Great Lakes actually changes occasionally and when the glaciers melted they left behind high ridges and fantastic rock formations. I also learned how the lakes were named. Lake Huron was named after the Huron Native Americans. It is labeled on most early maps as "Lac des Hurons" which means "Lake of the Huron Indians." Lake Ontario was named by Creuxius, Lacus Ontarius. In Iroquois, Ontara means "lake" and Ontario means "beautiful lake." Lake Michigan was called after a Native American name, "Michigami." Lake Erie was named after a Native American tribe which took up most of the lake's southern shores. The early French people always referred to it as "Lac du Chat" which means "Lake of the Cat." This was probably because the Erie's always referred to themselves as the "People of the Panther." Lake Superior was called by early French explorers as "el lac superieur" which means "Upper Lake." The Chippewa Native Americans called Lake Superior "Kitchi-gummi" meaning "Great-water" or "Great Lake." I also learned about lifesaving techniques to save passengers and/or crew from a sinking vessel not far from shore. One device was the Lyle gun. The Lyle gun was a gun that could shoot a line from the shore to the deck so that a breeches buoy could be attached. The breeches buoy was a device made of a pair of breeches with a buoy around the waist. Passengers and/or crew members would sit in the breeches and be pulled to shore. There are many careers that could be considered if one wanted a job connected to the Great Lakes. Someone who was interested in Great Lakes ship wrecks could become a shipwreck scientist. People in this field learn about a shipwreck and make a good guess where to find it. For shallow wrecks a set of scuba gear can be used. For deeper wrecks, however, an underwater camera should be used. Someone who is interested in the Great Lakes environment and/or finding solutions for pollution could become a Great Lakes marine biologist. Someone who would like to save lives of people in danger from shipwrecks could be on a rescue crew. Very special training is required for this. One has to know how to operate a boat and other things. Doing this project has been extremely helpful to me. Now that I know more about the Great Lakes I can apply these things when I go there next vacation. If I had more time to do this project I would learn more about early explorers and traders. I would also find out more about current industry in the Great Lakes. I would try to find out about ore individual lighthouses, and how the lens were make. This project has been fund to do and a great experience.   Glossary ballast water - water packed on board a ship at strategical points to help balance it in the water digotrophic - a body of water that contains little plant nutrients and are continuously cool and clear due to its huge size and depth eutrophican - a body of water that has little ecological balance and a large amount of plant growth which decreases the oxygen in the water which eventually kills some species of animal life glacier - a large body of ice moving slowly down a slope or valley or spreading outward on a land surface lens - a clear curved piece of glass in the tower of a lighthouse that is used to reflect light to warn approaching ships of dangerous places meltwater - water left by glaciers when they melt nomadic - to belong to a group of people who have no fixed home but wander from place to place PCBs - Polychlorinated Biphenyl peninsula - a piece of land surrounded by water on three sides pesticides - a chemical used to destroy pests transoceanic - crossing or extending across the ocean   Bibliography Hatcher, Harlan & Walter, Erich A. (1963). A Pictorial History of the Great Lakes. Crown Publishers, Inc. New York. National Audubon Society. "Great Lakes, Bitter Legacy" (Video). Turner Broadcasting System (WETA-TV). 2004. Inland Seas Maritime Museum. Vermilion, Ohio. January 22, 2005. Platt, Richard. (1997). Shipwreck. Random House, Inc. London. Unknown Author. Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. [Online] Available http://www.on.ec.gc.ca/glwqa/facts-e.html. 2004. Unknown Author. Lighthouses of the Great Lakes. [Online] Available http://lighthouse.boatnerd.com/. 2004. Unknown Author. T.E.A.C.H. Great Lakes, the Education and Curriculum Homesite. [Online] Available http://www.great-lakes.net/teach/. 2004. Unknown Author. "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" [Online] Available http://www.corfid.com/gl/wreck.htm. 2004. Unknown Author. Whitefish Point Lighthouse Overlooking Whitefish Bay on Lake Superior. [Online] Available http://www.exploringthenorth.com/whitefish/whitefish.htm/. 2004. .

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