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For me, my favorite memories of childhood are around those lakes.

Fishing in a small row boat with my father near the break-water into Lake Superior, for example. My dad had to row furiously because we had drifted too close. It was a nervous couple of minutes as we inched away from rough water back to the inner lake. You don't take a rowboat out onto Lake Superior, Lake Superior takes your rowboat, and you.

I recall the stone beaches in Copper Harbor... No sand, just large rounded stones, smoothed by the constant beating of Lake Superior's icy water. In the summer, my sister and I would wade out on the stones and see what we could find in the water. It was freezing cold! But it was so cool to walk on stone instead of sand.

The sandy mini-peninsulas on the Northern tip of Michigan's lower peninsula also hold fond memories. Sleeping Bear Dunes, looking out across Lake Michigan. Clean air, seagulls hanging in the sky...

Lots of stories that remain like impressionist paintings and leave that taste of happy childhood memories behind.

Yes, the Great Lakes are pretty great.

I grew up in south west Michigan and absolutely took them for granted. After almost 5 years in Austin we decided to come back to Michigan with the birth of our first child. I missed the lakes terribly, just totally took for granted that not everywhere has fresh water surrounding them on all sides.

In this climate change age, being close to so much fresh water really helps calm my nerves knowing that I am in a spot that will be able to weather the changes better then most and possibly become a refuge for more people.

OT: So many folks find themselves moving “home” when kids arrive, for a variety of reasons. As someone considering doing the same I’d be curious to hear yours.

I spent last summer in the Midwest (on a lake) and I found it first comforting (no fire season!) and then distressing as the rains failed to come and smoke eventually arrived instead. One of the driest summers I can recall. P

My guess is the biggest reason is to be closer to friends, family, and/or community. Having help to raise kids is huge. And when you have kids, you begin to focus on the real important things in life, and the type of environment you want your children to grow up in, and speaking for myself personally, I wanted them around as much family and love as possible.

It's also easier to do this now with more remote work opportunities and with more tech hubs across the country now.

Yeah, one of my wife and I's biggest mistakes was staying here in Ontario and settling even deeper into our property after her mother passed away. We should have moved at least temporarily to Alberta where my parents are, because it's been so hard raising kids (and now teens) without any close support. And now we're kind of stuck here, so. When you have kids, having close and extended family nearby is worth more than anything.

Pick your poison. Last summer was great because the lack of moisture meant a lack of mosquitoes which meant more enjoyable outdoorsing. I went an entire trip in the boundary waters without using bug spray. Unbelievable!

I think every economic migrant I've ever met (myself included) talks about moving home realtively soon "I'm only here for 2/5/ < 10 years", but very few of us do because we become established, make new friends, acquire lots of possessions. Some DO move home for major life events like kids arriving (or leaving) but I don't think it's as many as you assume, it's just very notable.

I'm lucky enough to have two sets of family still back home, close enough to visit easily but far enough to make it meaningful and intentional. The desire to move back has weakened every year.

Sure, but before I left Google last year, it was kind of crazy to see how many ex-pat Canadian Googlers transferred from Mountain View to the Waterloo office. Something something, Trump, something something, COVID.

Lots of people returning to their home country when things got a bit crazy.

I wouldn't bet too much on that.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-16/the-great...

It's a good article, and I think it's right that things could get much worse here. But it's missing the point, or avoiding it, that things are going to get much much worse in some other places, in particular the US and Canadian west. Record forest fires followed by record floods in BC last year were a bit of a taste of the future, unfortunately.

^This very much. I don't like pessimistic takes, but just based on the way everyone has handled climate change, things are going to be much worse for people not living in the great lakes region. And climate change is going to require cooperation from all the countries as well, and considering how well that goes even today I'm not holding my breath. If everything goes to hell in a hand basket and people start moving towards the great lakes regions en masse, then we will start figuring out how to preserve our great lakes. It could be too little too late, or it could require a massive effort the likes of the moon landing to fix the damage we could have prevented to the lakes if we had been diligent like this article suggest, but in my opinion the great lakes are the key at the end of all of this for a lot of people, and I'd rather have a few generational roots here for my family if that happens.

> In this climate change age

The Great Lakes only exist because the massive ice sheet melted and left the lakes as a deposit some 10-15,000 years ago.

I wouldn’t be surprised if in a few thousand years the lakes largely dissipate.

That said I grew up near the lake, definitely something that’s awesome to live near

A few thousand years is a long time. The lakes will be an essential treasure for the next 200 tumultuous years when water supplies become difficult.

Imagine what it was like here when the ice sheets first retreated. Niagara falls but times 100.

The Great Lakes will eventually go away, but not for the reason you think. Niagara Falls is eroding its way upstream and will eventually reach Lake Erie, at which point Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan will all drain away downstream.

How would that work. Would the Niagara gorge suddenly be able to increase its capacity orders of magnitude beyond its physical limits? Would the Detroit and St. Clair rivers suddenly be able to deliver an increased flow into Eerie?

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 to minimize this. As it works it way upstream, it will eventually intersect with the outlet of Lake Erie (over geological time scales), and will start to erode the outlet elevation downwards to achieve that nice concave-upwards longitudinal profile indicative of a river in dynamic equilibrium. In doing so, it will reduce the capacity of Lake Erie quite significantly. Someone above stated that the Great Lakes are below sea-level, and that's true for parts of most of the lakes, but not Erie, which has a maximum depth of about 64 m. It will eventually, over the long term become a wide part of the long river connecting Huron and Ontario. By the way, there are plenty of precedents for rivers suddenly and temporarily increasing their capacity to handle a sudden increase in flow; Google 'channelled scablands' and you might be surprised. I often joke with students that I won't want to live in Missisauga on the shores of Lake Ontario, which I do currently, when this event happens. Of course, it's only a joke because we're talking about a very, very long time away. As for the Detroit and St. Claire rivers increasing their capacity to Erie, I'm not sure why that would be necessary. Flow through this newly created 'Erie River' would simply adapt to carry the capacity of water supplied by Huron all the way to Lake Ontario, just as the Niagara river does now. There's no need for upstream change. Just think, the St. Lawrence River has the ability to convey the entire water supplied by all of the Great Lakes to the Atlantic.

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 Michigan/Huron via Detroit and St Claire will increase, but erosion is not necessary for this to occur?

Say we built a dam on the Detroit River that keeps Michigan/Huron at its current water level. And then Erie turns into a river. Once that transition is complete, we destroy the dam. How much time is necessary for Michigan/Huron to drain? Is the timescale days, weeks, months, years, etc?

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.

Thank you, that helps out quite a bit.

That will just make Lake Erie and Lake Ontario merge, more or less. Why would it drain Michigan at all?

This is old, but it's also possible that niagara falls just stops being falls and stops moving upstream: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/gsabulletin/article-abs...

>> Niagara Falls is eroding its way upstream and will eventually reach Lake Erie, at which point Lakes Erie, Huron, and Michigan will all drain away downstream.

The Detroit river, lake StClair, and the StClair river beg to differ. In particular, StClair has a channel cut through it for shipping to be possible as much of it is less than 10 feet deep. Flow would increase, but I think they'd maybe add a dam and lock somewhere to stop it. But Niagara is a long way from that point, especially since diversion for power has dramatically slowed the erosion.

I live on the Huron River in southeast Michigan and like to tease my son that in a few thousand years we will have the falls in our back yard. He is somewhat skeptical but loves the idea.

If this is true ("only b/c of melting ice sheet; will dissipate in next few thousand years") then wouldn't we expect water levels to be continuously dropping? Seems more likely that they exist because rain/meltwater makes its way to the basin and keeps them filled (irrespective of whether or not they were originally filled with meltwater from the ice sheet 15kya).

I believe a lot of it is ultimately fed by hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of smaller lakes upstream. The Canadian Shield is dotted with gazillions of lakes, it's crazy to fly over it. And I think it's safe to assume most of those lakes are glacial remnant water, not sure if they're fully refreshed by rain and snow.

Then I would expect these upstream lakes to be shrinking as of the last 10-15kya.

I know it's the internet and facts are as real as birds, but just in case you want some: [0].

[0] https://www.lre.usace.army.mil/Missions/Great-Lakes-Informat...

That's a pretty unecsscesary footnote

The watershed(s) aren't crazy huge: https://project.geo.msu.edu/geogmich/watershed.html

(Like just as a gut check, much of the border of Wisconsin and Minnesota is a tributary of the Mississippi River)

Ontario is filled to record high levels now because the inflow exceeds what is lost to the St. lawrence and evaporation.

The depths of all the lakes except Eerie are below mean sea level. It would require a prolonged period of new orogeny for the lakes to disappear. Since that hasn't happened in a few billion years in the area, it's more likely that the sun will expand to encompass the orbit of the Earth and vapourize the entire planet first.

Hardly something that will happen in a few thousand years. But you never know.

Superior was around a lot longer than that. Regardless based on the extreme water height swings since the glacial retreat water level seems to now depend more on climate and what the outlets are doing than anything to do with the melt off from the last glacial period. With humans already having much to do with both of these what will happen to them in the long run seems strictly up to our choices.

You live in one of the states where there is no squatter law and where you can legally shoot and kill someone for trying to steal your car. There is no maximum rifle magazine size. Castle doctrine for the win. Michigan has some interesting demographics. About half of the population in Michigan is concentrated in about 4-5 cities, the other half of the population are spread across much more area and more spread apart. This explains why Michigan can be either a republican or democrat state, most of the votes for state are fairly tied.

I don't know why you are getting downvoted - as a lifelong michigan resident, the politics are weird and getting weirder. The Michigan Militia and their offshoots are still around and still scary.

Maybe because it’s not even remotely on topic and introducing polarizing, flamethrowing topics for absolutely no reason? Born and raised downriver, so I have to ask, why the hell are you apologizing for it? You know just as well as I do that there’s a lot more to Michigan than that take, and that’s coming from someone whose family knows the Terry Nichols family quite well.

Hey, a thread about the great lakes, let me shit on this person’s nice story and remind them nowhere is perfect! seems to be the only motivation, either that or stirring up political knife fighting. A flag is far, far more appropriate than a downvote

Man I also live in Michigan and I've spent every moment I can trying to get out. I mean, good for you for figuring out what you want in life and making that happen but you couldn't pay me enough to come back to this place if and when I leave.

Funny enough though, you sound very similar to my friend who moved back to Michigan from Portland also because of his first child, so who knows? Maybe there's something to Michigan for raising a family

I go swimming in the West short of lake Huron. It is by far the best water for plain old swimming I've experienced. It's a big body of water so nice rolling waves are constant. Yet, unlike some inland lakes there is no stagnancy, just clear salt free water. Huge sand bars, miles long a hundred meters or more from shore.

My wife and I are looking to buy a lakehouse/property up in Oscoda because we love watching the sun come up and swimming in the lake.

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".

I was born in Toronto but grew up on the west coast, then the interior of BC and now in Alberta, and I'll never leave the mountains, but I loved summers on Lake Erie. Ontario cottage life is very different from western cabin life. The recovery of Erie is a huge accomplishment and while humans should get some credit I believe most of it is due to the size and resiliency of the Great Lakes ecosystem.

And if we're keeping track: I'll take a freezing glacial mountain lake over the humid heat every time :)

I mean, honestly, I like both. And being a skier these days I just wish I lived out west, and near my family. But we've put our roots down here, and I fear for the climate future of BC and the political future for Alberta.

I was in Jasper 3 times in the last 8 months. Almost flew out there for a fourth this weekend (closing weekend @ Marmot Basin) but I have gardening to do :-)

I guess. I don’t miss them and always thought they were cold and smelly and didn’t make for great beaches. The weather around them is awful as well with long, bitter cold winters and summer days that are often extremely humid. You can’t really eat the fish out them either due to high levels of mercury.

Additionally the land around the lakes is nice but not spectacular. At least not for North America.

If I were to plan a trip to the general region and wanted wilderness then I’d pick the Boundary Waters I think.

You just went to the wrong beaches. There's plenty of sand or pebble beaches with very clear water and little organic matter, especially along Huron where the water is alkaline. It's just cold.

I always felt that if you want big sandy beaches you go to Lake Michigan, somewhere like Grand Haven or Ludington.

Same lake, just around the bend. I've never been to the western shore of Huron in Michigan, so can't compare to ours in Ontario. But along ours there's some lovely sandy beaches.

Erie can get pretty gross.

I don't know about the southern shore of Erie, but the Canadian side has Long Point, Rock Point, Port Dover, Turkey Point, and Burwell. They're all amazing and the water is shallow enough to be pretty family friendly as well as warming up quickly in the early summer.

Yeah I've been to those, Long Point in particular is amazing.

It's so gorgeous, and it's awesome that there's a big stretch of public beach with cottages on it (many of which are rentable) but then there's also the provincial park there that has a whole other section of shoreline— you have to pay to access it, but the bathrooms are nicer and there's more parking.

Shhh . . . no need to attract more people to Western Michigan. Let them continue to think it's nothing special.

I have been to a Great Lake one time (Lake Erie) and it made me sad. The shore had a bunch of dead fish all over it and it smelled very bad. The person i was with, an Erie, PA native, said that the water was pretty much "dead". Very antidotal but if left an impression on me.

I grew up in Erie—the invasive Zebra mussels have cleaned up Lake Erie a lot in the past couple decades. My understanding is that fish populations are doing much better now because of it.

Zebra mussels are actually quite destructive to the ecosystem, and quickly lead to waters that are choked with vegetation (because light can penetrate deeper into the water), and lacking the sorts of food consumed by filter feeders that form the base of the food chain.

There are some species of fish that prefer the thicker vegetation, but fish populations overall decline significantly when zebra mussels invade.

Erie is the worst of it because a) it's shallow b) it's warmest c) it is surrounded by intensive agriculture with underregulated fertilizer run-off. But there are actually some nice places along it.

Long Point on its north shore in southern Ontario is a fantastic beautiful beach.

You can eat the fish. They recommend not eating it more than once a week though.

Chicago local here, and Lake Michigan kitesurfer and surfer. The best swells hit when in the fall and spring, so you better have a good wetsuit. That said, since getting into the sports it makes me love the lake even more. You quickly get over the temp, and just get to enjoying the water. Its also nice to not have to worry about sharks! Some of the best surfing in the area is up in Sheboygan, WI, the Malibu of the Midwest.

I practically live in Lake Michigan in Chicago, because of my dog, and learning to embrace the cold means you get the beauty of seeing this huge, open expanse of water with nobody else around, because they are sane and are avoiding the cold.

https://perardi.info/photography/0.jpg

https://perardi.info/photography/9.jpg

great shots!

> You quickly get over the temp, and just get to enjoying the water.

Having grown up in Michigan I'd say it's more aptly put as "if you're one that can learn to live with the temperature the water can be a lot of fun" as certainly not everyone gets over it - even of those that often enjoy the water!

Never really cared much about the lack of sharks but I will say there is something special about having that "I might as well be at the ocean" scale of water without the damn salt.

I loved kitesurfing on Lake Michigan before I moved out to the gorge this year. I was out in Indiana and usually rode MC, Lake St and Wolf. I made some great friends and have some awesome memories of my time there.

This is more my experience too. I've lived in the midwest my whole life and honestly cannot understand it why people actually like it here. Maybe if you're really into winter sports I guess. For me, I can barely stand going outside for more than a few minutes for 5+ months out of the year.

IL local and fisherman here.

The beaches can have algal blooms which make it smelly some days, and of course there's the history of the dead alewives (but that's not really an issue anymore).

Most days the beaches are lovely, the water clear and nice smelling. The farther you get from big cities, the more true that is. I spent a week on North Manitou Island once. It was incredibly beautiful, like if Hawaii was freaking freezing all the time.

The fish near Chicago have some issues, but it's less Mercury and more PCB's and other toxins.

https://dph.illinois.gov/content/dam/soi/en/web/idph/publica...

I grew up a five minute walk from Lake Erie in a small town several hours SW of Toronto near the Grand River.

Like people who live on the coasts it gets into your blood.

The summers really are something else. I don’t miss my home county so much, but I have a vivid image of the rolling countryside and summer drives listening to music. It’s a memory I tap into often.

These days I live in Dundas and if you haven’t made it down here yet I recommend it!

Oh, hi neighbour. I'm up north of Waterdown on 6 acres. Dundas is where we do most of our "town time." The archaeology dig I was talking about was @ Cootes on the RBG lands.

Go figure. Guess I'm preaching to the choir!

How long have you lived in this part? I caught in another comment that you're into poetry. Do you frequent The Printed Word here in town? We only moved into Dundas a little over a year ago, and I finally made it into that shop and could easily lose a lot of money there. A recent haul of mine included a first edition of The Old Ways by Gary Snyder—and there are many more gems!

It will be 10 years this July. Printed Word is a place I need to frequent more often, though I have been there a couple... expensive... times. Unfortunately these days I tend to fall asleep when reading, I can't dig into anything intense. :-)

> Canada

Unlike you, the author of the AtlasObscura piece seems to have a blind spot to the other country in which almost all of the Great Lakes exist. What an appalling oversight.

As a French guy, I have always associated the Great Lakes with Canada.

I had to look it up to realize that most of it is within US borders.

>> I had to look it up to realize that most of it is within US borders.

Not really. 4 of the lakes are on the US-Canadian border. Lake Michigan is completely within the US though.

Only Lake Michigan is within US borders, while the others are almost evenly split between Canada and the U.S.A., thus my irritation with the AtlasObscura piece.

I know exactly how you feel. I lived two blocks from Lake Michigan in Chicago for about 5 years. Most mornings I would ride along the lake on the way to work, even though it was the wrong way, just to see the lake, feel the air, and spend a little time next to it.

I live in Ottawa now, but I grew up in the GTA and spent most of my summers on Lake Ontario. You're right, there's something mystical about it.

Also, just wanted to share my favourite love letter to the lakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqkWnnPjzv0

I grew up in west Michigan probably about 40 minutes from Lake Michigan, but my favorite memory of the great lakes is similar to yours. While we were camping on Lake Superior a big storm rolled in, and I got to watch waves just roll right over a massive stone break water. The sheer power of that is certainly something to behold.

It's funny, because having grown up near the Great Lakes, the wide open land of the prairies and tundra appeal to me in a way that the geography of S. Ontario just doesn't. I like to see the horizon, and you just can't do that here, unless you're right on one of the lakes.

You take someone who grew up on the prairies and drop them in the mountains and they feel claustrophobic and constrained. I visit SK/MB and feel very uncomfortable because I can't ge tthe lay of the land without altitude.

We benefit & suffer from our infinite adaptability.

Re: appreciation, yes. The Great Lakes are unique and amazing. The more you travel, the more you realize it. I love hearing from people who visited the Great Lakes and were like: I can't see land on the horizon! This is an ocean! But also, no jellyfish +1

Nice! I've lived on St. Josephs Island in Lake Huron and still miss nature every day. Crappy economy though.

European (and much smaller) version of the story - I moved to Switzerland to shores of Lake Geneva (Lac Leman for locals), from eastern part of Europe with much drier and colder climate.

Its blessing in many ways - the air is pleasantly humid, but nothing tropical apart from proper heatwave in summer (happens once every few years it seems). Humidity makes winter much more bearable (although it makes 0 degrees celzius properly cold), but its not too much and there are no mold issues. Lake is huge temperature reservoir - keeps the winter cold milder and summer heat lower. Its great for swimming in summer (water has easily 15m visibility, very sea-like experience). A lot of public access to it so you can swim for free or in worst case pay few francs for places with extra facilities.

I love mountains too, and the Alps are everywhere on south side, literally rising 1500m higher straight from the lake. On the other side, Jura mountain range is rather just hills but pretty (and more approachable for easy goers). On south-facing steep north slopes, beautiful Unesco heritage vineyards.

For somebody who grew far from any lake, from landlocked country and former communism that prevented any meaningful travel, I am 11+ years on vacation and still in awe (when I don't work).

This is beautifully written.

I couldn’t help noticing that as well! While reading it I was pining for lakes I’ve never seen in a country I’ve never been to.

Thanks, I think I'd rather write poetry than code for $$ these days, but, uh, that wouldn't pay my mortgage or feed my kids, so.