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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I lived on an Island in Lake Huron for about 5 years and went visiting the Lake Superior area many times. To call it a lake does not really do it justice: it's an inland sea, and a most impressive one. I've seen the lake from the shore in more than one storm and it didn't look any different than the ocean, except that it seemed in many ways more violent. I asked the locals about it and they said that the lake is more violent than the sea in places but there wasn't any coherent explanation, it could be the steep rise of what eventually becomes the shoreline rather than the much more gradual one the ocean usually has.

There are also much lower periodicity waves in such constrained bodies called 'seiches':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seiche

There is a museum dedicated to the wrecks, well worth visiting, but do bring earplugs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Shipwreck_Museum

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Thanks for that, super interesting about sieches. A standing wave not directly from the moon or waves.From the wiki:

Lake seiches can occur very quickly: on July 13, 1995, a large seiche on Lake Superior caused the water level to fall and then rise again by one metre (three feet) within fifteen minutes, leaving some boats hanging from the docks on their mooring lines when the water retreated

In Chicago I’ve observed and measured a consistent 0.8kn (1.48 km/hr) current set flowing north after a long week of consistent breezes out of the north. The water just piles up in the shallow end of the lake and when the breeze dies that water needs to go somewhere.

Lake Michigan has the least turnover of all the lakes and when thinking about predicting current on it it’s good to imagine a 300 mile long bathtub.

> it’s good to imagine a 300 mile long bathtub

Harrods was destroyed by the Vogons.

Hilarious comment, thank you. Now I will have to go and see every bathtub from now on as a tiny Lake Michigan...

Heh, yea my parents were big on folk music so I heard the song a lot growing up, and was always vaguely puzzled how a such a large ship could get in so much trouble on just a lake.

I still remember the "oh I get it" moment when I visited Michigan as a teen and saw Lake Michigan for the first time.

I assume you thought the "hurricane west wind" line from the song was exaggerated. The winds down the middle of the lake, in certain seasons, are 80mph.

https://www.michiganseagrant.org/lessons/lessons/by-broad-co... and Reexamination of the 9–10 November 1975 “Edmund Fitzgerald” Storm Using Today’s Technology - https://www.michiganseagrant.org/lessons/wp-content/uploads/... (pdf from 2006)

    The captain of the Arthur M. Anderson later indicated that as it moved into the area where the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost (Fig. 2) waves were between 5.5 and 7.5 m and winds gusted between 70 kt (35 m s–1) and 75 kt (37.5 m s–1).

   ...

    Wave heights of individual waves generally follow a Rayleigh distribution (Lonquet-Higgins 1952) so that the maximum wave height in 7-m seas, although rare and unlikely, could be as high as 14 m. It is particularly noteworthy that the most severe conditions in the simulations occurred between 0000 and 0100 UTC, coincident in time and location with the loss of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Yes, after the ship was already screwed, they moved the ship to the far side of a small island where the winds would be slowed and the waves would be smaller. Unfortunately, their depth maps were inaccurate and the water wasn't deep enough such that they bashed the hull. If it weren't for the extreme winds, they wouldn't have moved the ship to try to get out of them.

Growing up on the shores of Lake Michigan made any lake I could see the other side of feel like more of a pond than a lake.

Ha. Me too. I remember looking at Lake Champlain for the first time and commenting it wasn't that big. My friends looked at me like I was crazy. "You can see across it!" That was the day I learned how big Lake Michigan was compared to nearly every other lake on the planet.

For people interested in the history of shipping on the Great Lakes, along with the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum, consider visiting the Valley Camp museum (a lake freighter that has been made into a museum ship) in Sault Ste. Marie, MI and the Soo Locks and visitors center, right down the street.

Sadly, the days of getting to walk out onto the locks for "Engineer's Day" (held on the last Friday of June, typically) are over. In 2025 the public wasn't allowed into the operational area of the locks ("out of an abundance of caution").

From Moby Dick, on the Great Lakes:

> they are swept by Borean and dismasting blasts as direful as any that lash the salted wave; they know what shipwrecks are, for out of sight of land, however inland, they have drowned full many a midnight ship with all its shrieking crew.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page%3AMoby-Dick_(1851)_US_ed...

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