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Comment by godtoldmetodoit | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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 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

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.

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.

>> 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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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.

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

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