MARBLEHEAD — A first-of-its-kind winter water sampling of the Great Lakes began here Wednesday on six inches of ice covering western Lake Erie’s Sandusky Bay.
The project, which involves more than a dozen U.S. and Canadian institutions, is to give Great Lakes scientists more insight into what’s happening to water quality during the middle of winter. Similarly coordinated events have been done in summer, but not in winter.
The goal is for researchers to perform consistent testing on the samples and generate “a common suite of measurements no matter where they've been,” George Bullerjahn, a Bowling Green State University distinguished professor and director of BGSU’s Center for Fresh Waters and Human Health, said.
In general, they’re looking at water quality, water chemistry, and for the presence of microscopic waterborne organisms known as zooplankton, he said.
Most of the sampling will be done during the week of Feb. 14, the date that historically has marked peak ice cover extent on the Great Lakes. Some of the work will be done from U.S. and Canadian icebreakers, according to a University of Michigan news release.
The sampling event occurred on a Sandusky Bay embayment near Hidden Hideaway Campground & Marina.
All three of the researchers on the embayment have BGSU ties: Besides Mr. Bullerjahn, there was Ryan Wagner, a graduate student working in his laboratory, and Mike McKay, who serves a dual appointment as a BGSU research professor and as executive director of the University of Windsor’s Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research.
“We know quite a lot about the Great Lakes during nine months or so of ice-free conditions,” Mr. McKay said. “But during the three months of winter, we know next to nothing about what happens beneath the ice of the Great Lakes. It's really a black box to our understanding on how the Great Lakes function.”
The Canadian-born Mr. McKay is one of the anomalies in that respect, being one of the few Great Lakes scientists who has developed a research focus on wintertime algae and lake water conditions in general.
He is involved with a joint U.S.-Canadian initiative called Operation Coal Shovel, in which coast guards from those two nations bring along a select group of researchers while their ships free up ice jams to keep the Great Lakes open as much as possible for winter navigation.
Though much of the information from Wednesday’s event won’t be fully known until samples are analyzed in laboratories, many of the on-the-spot physical observations — such as light penetration, sediment suspension, and temperature — were consistent with what would be expected.
Light penetration, influenced by the amount of sunlight, cloud cover, snow, and other factors, is important to the 250-some species of algae in Lake Erie, most of which — such as diatoms — are healthy and important to the food chain.
The bad actors are what’s known as cyanobacteria, because of their blue-green hue. Microcystis, which produces the toxin microcystin, is Lake Erie’s most prevalent. It’s the one that gets the most attention because of the poisonous mat it can form across the lake surface during summertime when it’s abundant enough to form what are known as harmful algal blooms, or HABs.
To draw the samples, researchers used an auger to drill four holes through the embayment ice, each about a foot apart. Then, they used a hacksaw to make the holes one hole big enough for various types of instrumentation to be submerged for collecting scientific data.
The most sophisticated and expensive is a water quality sonde that, among other things, measures water pigments as an added tool for determining the presence of microscopic algae.
“We probably will see some cyanobacteria [back in the lab], but they won’t be in abundance,” Mr. Bullerjahn said.
The trio calculated the “light extinction rate” in the three feet of water beneath the ice at multiple depths on a sunny morning with temperatures slightly above freezing, to see how far light penetrated. They concluded light levels that day “could certainly promote algal growth,” Mr. McKay said.
He said he expects the dozens of coordinated samples to reveal more about how each particular location within the Great Lakes region functions.
“The big thing is the Great Lakes aren’t homogeneous,” Mr. McKay said.
Ice is an important part of the Great Lakes system. It helps prevent some scouring and erosion of shorelines and, thus, helps keep the lakes from becoming as polluted. It helps some fish species spawn, can fend off some invasive species, helps reduce evaporation, and can help moderate lake-effect snow and wave action.
“Ice is beneficial,” Mr. McKay said. “But we know that ice is declining across the Great Lakes. Over the past 50 years, ice has declined 71 to 75 percent.”
This year’s winter sampling is the first of what is expected to be many, results of which will “provide a baseline and reference point” as the lakes continue to warm from climate change and ice cover continues to decline, he said.
More than two dozen researchers will be traveling by foot, snowmobile, all-terrain vehicles, and sleds to get to where they need to drill through ice for samples next week. One is even planning to use a fan-driven airboat to glide across the ice, according to the U-M release.
The project is funded in large part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and its Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research house at the University of Michigan. This year’s sampling is headed by Ted Ozersky, a researcher at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.
This winter had been on track for a near-record low in Great Lakes ice cover. But the lakes rebounded and formed substantial ice because of frigid temperatures in January and early February.
First Published February 9, 2022, 8:38 p.m.
