Bathers walk a widening Lake Michigan beach near Brevort in the Upper Peninsula. At the same spot last year, high waters rose to the green dunes behind and threatened U.S. Highway 2.

As the Great Lakes shrink, a wave of alarm swells

Receding waters hurt property, recreation, shipping and wildlife;Uncovered toxins threaten drinking water and food chain

Story By Jeremy Pearce | Photos By Dale G. Young
The Detroit News

he five freshwater seas that define 10,000 miles of inland shores are dropping away from the bluffs, beaches, harbors and islands shared by two nations. Scientists are puzzled by a rereat they haven’t seen for three decades, a retreat so rapid that it is watched with unease by Great Lakes residents in eight states and two Canadian provinces.

    Measured in feet on three of the lakes, declines bring epic challenges for the mammoth cargo ships that depend on this water highway, for anglers who live and eat from the lakes, for shoreline property owners, vacationers, boaters and for wildlife.

    At stake are millions of dollars, thousands of jobs and a long-accepted way of life.

    From levels measured one year ago, Lakes Michigan and Huron have slipped 17 inches.

    Lake Erie set a 30-year record low in July, alarming the scientists and boaters who charted it. It is down by 17 inches.

    Bordering Metro Detroit, the broad river delta known as Lake St. Clair has dropped 16 inches.

    Lake Superior is two inches above last year’s level. Bolstered by recent rains and held back with special gates, Superior’s small gains are not enough to compensate for losses in other lakes.

    As rocks, wrecks and dock pilings break surface beside murky landmarks not glimpsed since the 1960s, lower lakes raise hazards above and below the surface, and are reviving waste chemicals stored within bottom sediments to risk ingestion by fish, birds and people.

    “We hesitate to use the word drought, but it is starting to cross our lips,” said Dr. Frank Quinn, a senior federal hydrologist who tracks lake levels for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Ann Arbor.

    Warmer weather during the past two winters reduced snowfall over northern lands that feed waters at the system’s source, but larger explanations for regional warming are not yet clear.

    “Most of the present generation haven’t seen the lakes like this,” Quinn said. “The question is, are they going to see waters go even lower?”

    Among the impacts:

* Intense dredging may be causing the most lasting damages from continuing lake declines. Buried chemical compounds, pesticides and heavy metals flushed into the Great Lakes during 100 years of industry are being freed to again enter the food chain.

* The 1,000-foot freighters hauling iron ore, coal and stone that fuel the Midwest’s industries are limiting their loads to avoid hitting bottom. Harbors and channels they travel are dangerously shallow, leading to a doubling in dredging.

* Pleasure boaters have seen boat launches, docks and piers rendered useless. Unable to dredge, a score of recreational harbors in Michigan and Ontario are all but shut.

    “We can’t even get our boats into the water,” said Mike Collins, a marine construction worker whose permanent tan stands as a reminder of 40 years spent building docks on Lake Michigan’s coast, near Pentwater.

    “Every few decades, the lake is supposed to make a cycle, high to low,” he said. “But you kind of forget about it. You forget this water is moving on somewhere.”

* Scientists are unsure how falling waters will influence 150 species of native fish and the exacting balance between them. They note that fish near shore are losing spawning habitat.

* With hundreds of intakes piping drinking water from the lakes, health experts also worry about threats to purity.

* Politicians and government officials are uneasily debating solutions to low water.

Fishermen such as Ojibway Indian Lynn Rickley of St. Ignace depend on lake waters for their livelihood.

    “Some people suggest we’re hiding two feet of water from Lake Michigan,” said Thomas J. Baldini of the International Joint Commission, the Canadian-American board that oversees boundary waters between the two nations.

    “The water is gone,” he said flatly. “We have no secret supply.”

Perplexing problems

    At a meeting of lake scientists and government officials in Montreal this May, participants agreed that low water brings a more perplexing set of problems than high water did during the 1980s.

    “The lakes are the driving force behind our economies,” said Paul Begin, Quebec’s minister of environment. “As they drop, the issue of who owns them and uses them is going to be a growing concern.”

    Theories for lake cycles abound. Scientists agree, however, that strong evidence shows a yearly high-to-low cycle, and a second, larger cycle with deeper peaks and depths that occurs roughly every 30 years.

    A third and more tentative theory points to extremely deep lows arriving every 150 years.

    Searching for that longer view, U.S. and Canadian scientists study lake records to see if this year’s retreat is part of a more profound pattern, and, if so, what course future levels are likely to take.

    “That’s really the ultimate question,” said Roger Gauthier, senior hydrologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Detroit and a leading researcher on lake levels.

    “The lakes have been here for more than 10,000 years and we have only this tiny, 140-year window of recorded data to study. It’s hard to come to useful conclusions.”

Looking for patterns

    As a rule, lakes swell to their highest in summer, as spring melting rolls down the system. Levels sink to their lowest in winter, when snow piles up and freezes flows from tributaries. This tends to be a reliable annual pattern.

    Reviewing their records, Gauthier and others have noticed broader patterns of lake declines that seem to take place about every 30 years.

    When historic lows were set on Lakes Michigan and Huron in 1964, the word drought was used freely by journalists and scientists.

    That year, residents near Lake Charlevoix were treated to a scene from Michigan’s logging past. Axes, sawmill tools and millions of feet of sunken boards from the mid-1800s came to light from the lake’s drying bed. Similar severe lows for Lakes Erie and Ontario came in 1934, three decades before 1964.

Brink of drought From highs recorded just a year ago, water levels on four of the five Great Lakes have rapidly plunged. Scientists say rises on Lake Superior in July and August can’t replace the losses.

    In the search for an even longer-term pattern, one theory poses that extended lows occur every 150 years.

    Indiana geologists studying Lake Michigan sand dunes are digging into beach ridges, checking the ages of ridge sediments and charting periods of lake lows and highs.

    They discovered that Michigan’s waters have fallen more than 12 feet in the past 4,500 years. Other studies of Lake Superior’s ridges are under way. Early results show Lake Michigan may fluctuate by as much as 4 feet during the 150-year swings.

    “What we’ve found suggests that all of the Great Lakes are at their 150-year high, which means we could be entering a time of record lows,” said Dr. Todd A. Thompson of the Indiana Geological Survey in Bloomington.

    Still, Gauthier, Quinn and other experts advising Great Lakes legislators are reluctant to make predictions much farther than six months into the future.

    “We can say that chances for high waters next year are small,” Gauthier said. “We’d need at least a full year of above-average rain and snow to make any gains in our lake levels at all.”

    Faced with a combined lakes surface area bigger than Idaho, officials in Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Indiana say they can do little for residents but watch and warn.

Answers elusive

    In frustration, groups of property owners call for the building of enormous water gates to achieve more mechanical control of lake levels.

    Others petition for government aid and compensation to pay for their crumbling sea walls.

    “We aren’t gods and we can’t control the entire lake system,” said G. Tracy Meehan III, director of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality’s Office of the Great Lakes.

    “To talk about a major shift in state policy wouldn’t be helpful because we can’t predict future levels,” he said. “In the end, the federal government is going to have to lead on this.”

    But from the wilderness shores of northern Lake Superior down through Chicago, Detroit, and some of the continent’s most populated cities, residents are waiting, hoping the lakes soon will resume their balance.

    “A year or so ago, it was high and sloshing up to our property lines,” recalled John Crosby, a Toronto lawyer who walks his dog on Lake Ontario’s beaches, under the shadow of the city’s skyline.

    He watched sailing craft on the far horizon and ducks landing noisily on the water in front of him. His black dog lapped at the lake’s edge.

    From here, waters run down the long, straight St. Lawrence Seaway, past Montreal and to their end, where the Great Lakes disappear into salt ocean.

    “We live next to this water,” he said slowly. “We don’t own it.”