I really like people defending their body’s of water and respect that. When you get to see any of the Great Lakes in person, clear day or November gales. You will be in awe.
Well, I heard, at the meeting we attended, that if the lakes reach a certain high level some of the water is drain, ultimately, into the Mississippi through a canal system, the Des Plaines & Illinois rivers - I think at Chicago. It's part of the "inland waterway", which I do know exists. If that's right there is a connection, correct?
@@Steve-eq8iz Funny, San Antonio, Texas, has an oxbow in the river there. They have built a canal across the narrow part of the oxbow creating an island park. They also dye their river green for St. Patrick's Day. It was great to sit/lunch on the balcony of the Hard Rock Café , overlooking the river and the partying.
Look into videos on how Chicago reversed the flow of a river in 1900 so that sewage from the city would not pollute Lake Michigan, the source of fresh drinking water. There is also a massive “deep tunnel” under Chicago that holds up to 2.4 billion gallons (over 9 billion liters) of storm runoff so that the locks to Lake Michigan rarely needed to handle overflow from the Chicago River. A lot of amazing engineering.
You should watch a documentary called "Unsalted" about surfing on the great lakes. You'd be shocked to see how big and consistent the waves can be on all five lakes. I've personally surfed three of them.
The beautiful blue St.Clair River, I grew up in Marine City, 💙 I loved looking across the river to Canada and watching the freighters 😢 I miss it. Peace✌️Gary😊
I was blessed to grow up on the Great Lakes, and though I live in Florida now, I have a house on huron still for summers. They are truly magnificent and magical, especially in the summer time. Winter is interesting and beautiful, but that weather is harsh!
The great lakes were collectively named centuries ago. Early explorers of North America were planning on walking to Canada when they were stopped in their tracks by huge bodies of water and they said, (in a sarcastic tone), "GREAT! LAKES!" -this is one of those completely unknown facts
Please watch "The Wreck of Edmond Fitzgerald". It's by Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. It tells the tale of a tanker on Lake Superior, and the weather that sailors face on the Great Lakes.
I grew up just north of Lake Erie. The beaches there were like ocean beaches, complete with lighthouses, with no sign of even any of the islands between the Canadian and American sides from the shore. If you could see past the horizon, you might be able to see some of the massive ships using the lakes for transport. There were even large waves (created by wind currents vs lunar gravity). Farther to the east the Lake flows into rivers you can easiy cross by bridge or ferry, eventually joining Lake Ontario where, of course, you get Niagara Falls. The Falls were close enough that I went there so many times I sort of took them for granted. Since moving to Australia, and seeing the lakes, falls, etc through the eyes of my Aussie family, I have much more appreciation for them.
The levels of the Great Lakes fluctuate on a regular basis. A few years ago they were at what were called historic lows (Note: The lake levels have only been monitor since about 1871, so that is not that long a time). Now, they are near their historic highs, similar to what they were in the 1990s. when lakeside apartments in Chicago were being flooded by high waves. Wave heights of over 40 feet have been measured on the lakes. The big bulk carriers are called "footers" as they are 1,000 feet long (305 meters) and sized to just pass through the Sault Ste Marie Locks. The only connection of the lakes to the Mississippi River system is through the Chicago River and the Cal-Sag channel which connects eventually connects to the Illinois River which drains into the Mississippi. As a result of these connections, both through the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the Saint Lawrence Seaway system, it is possible for shipbuilders on the Great Lakes to build ocean-going ships for the U.S. Navy. During World War 2, a fair number of submarines were built in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and then they traveled down through the river system to enter the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans.
@@j1r2000 Ever look at how the Great Lakes, Lake Winnipeg/Manitoba, Great/Lesser Slave Lake, Reindeer Lake, Great Bear Lake and Lake Athabasca are all in a line from southeast to northwest? Hard to believe they aren't all related in some way. I don't think it's crazy to think the glaciers moved in that direction when they retreated and carved them all out in series.
@@j1r2000 They're separate, but they're pretty great in my opinion. The main thing against them is they're remote and mostly landlocked. Almost makes up for the USA controlling all of Lake Michigan, but not really.
Since you have been enjoying Canadiana and have hit the Great Lakes I would like to suggest Paddle to the Sea on the National Film Board TH-cam channel
Just to clear things up, the Mississippi River does not connect to the Great Lakes at all and is not part of the Great Lakes water shed. A lot, and I mean a lot of the info in this vid is wrong. Yes, the last glaciers did carve out some of the Great Lakes, but the basin was there long before the last glacier and were created over million of years by tectonic plate movements. The term "basin" has geographic meaning, and it doesn't mean carved out. Interesting fact, there are some archeological studies of the Great Lakes that show there were people living in that area long before there were lakes, but there were water ways. The basin was there, but the water came after the glaciers melted. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090608182543.htm Anyone interested in studying Canadian / American relations, they would do well learning the history of the Great Lakes and how both countries share them and how they were divided between the two countries. OJB, I love that you have interest in learning Canadian geography and its history, but PLEASE, PLEASE, check the sources, especially if it comes from the U.S. There was no research done in this vid, the person who made it took tid bits of information off the internet and made a vid. I have to say this, you can never understand why they call them the Great Lakes until you actually see them. I have never seen the ocean, but I would like to think the closest thing to it is the Great Lakes. They are beautiful!
While it is not naturally connected, a canal was built to connect the two allowing barge traffic to access both waterway systems nearing 200 years ago.
I've studied geology and this is absolutely correct. Before the Great Lakes existed and prior to the Pleistocene ice age there were ancient river systems where the Great Lakes are now. They created a series of shallow valleys or basins in the region may have connected with the ancient Mississippi River. A pre-glacial river called the Teays River flowed across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois into the pre-glacial Mississippi. A river called the ancient Lake Michigan River ran down the center of the Lake Michigan basin into the Teays River, Repeated glaciations of the region by ice sheets widened and deepened the basins now occupied by the Great Lakes and when the ice sheets melted back glacial moraines were left behind helping to form the future Great Lakes. Each glaciation of the four that occurred during the Pleistocene created ancestors of the present Great Lakes which were larger than the ones during the previous glaciation. During the end of the last, or Wisconsinan, glaciation huge amounts of meltwater from the terminus of the ice sheet flowed into the upper Mississippi River and its tributaries from the glacial lobe occupying the Lake Superior basin until the ice sheet melted back and the Mississippi drainage basin was finally cut off from the Great Lakes drainage basin. The upper Mississippi in Minnesota didn't form until only a few thousand ago when the great ice sheet finally melted back from that region.
Lake Superior is so deep compared to its surface area that it never gets very warm at all - and experiences winter temperatures where the lake partially freezes over. It does occasionally freeze over completely - but apparently not in the 21st century. Lake Michigan does not naturally drain into the Mississippi river basin - there is a Navigational lock that connects a canal that leads to a tributary of the Mississippi to the lake- near Chicago. One of the oldest natural trade routes connecting the 2 drainages is at Portage, Wisconsin - were the Fox River (Draining to Lake Michigan) passes within about 1.5 miles (2.4KM) of the Wisconsin River - which flows into the Mississippi.
I seem to recall when I lived in Wisconsin years ago, there was a controversy about those locks that connect to the Mississippi. I think I recall an invasive species that was allowed to get into Lake Michigan from the Mississippi via those locks. Is that still an issue?
@@leroyjames2825 There are several invasive species issues - the lamprey eel was considered a huge problem in the 1960's, later the zebra mussel was a major challenge and currently there is an ongoing battle with keeping the Asian Carp out of the lakes... each of these has been and are being countered with varying degrees of success and failure.
Actually there is a tri point on the great divide in the rocky mountains(which is the bc/alberta border) were one side of the mountain feeds water to the Pacific, on side goes north to the arctic and one side goes west to the hudson bay.
There's a similar point near Hibbing, Minn. Some water flows to the Mississippi, some flows to Lake Superior and some flows to the Red River of the North to Winnipeg and eventually Hudson Bay.
Fun facts the video didn’t mention: Lake Michigan is the only Great Lake entirely in the US and it is the most polluted of them all. The other 4 lakes are all in Ontario. Ontario is that big! Also, water levels in the lakes can be controlled by a series of dams that regulate how much water goes into the St.Lawrence. A few years ago we experienced very high water levels partly due the dams holding back much more water than usual to prevent cities like Montreal from severe flooding.
Lake Erie is the most polluted of the lake, followed by Ontario, Michigan and Huron are about the same, superior is the least because it's so big and cold it dilutes some pollution it takes in
When friends of my parents visited and saw Lake Ontario he couldn't believe it was fresh water, he thought the only bodies of water that large were salt water. Lake Ontario has been cleaned up considerably, I remember in the 80s there were signs on the beaches and in the parks in Toronto forbidding swimming due to the pollution but it's safe to do so now.
it's because of some old sewer systems in toronto are still connected to rainwater sewers so when it rains hard too much water flows into the sewage treatment plant which overflows. it's poop pollution not toxic chemicals. they have spent years and years separating the systems.
Yes, I had a cousin from north Wales visiting us in Wasaga Beach. when we took him to the actual beach he asked what sea it was and whether we had tides. He was stunned to know he was looking at a relatively small bay, Nottawasaga Bay, part of the Georgian Bay shore line, and that Georgian Bay was just a part of Lake Huron. It's also where you'll find the thirty thousand islands which you can cruise.
Some of the lakes also have quite the history for shipwrecks. Ask A Mortician did a video on ‘the lake that never gives up its dead’ (something like that) and interviewed the (i think) grandson of a captain who is still down there with his ship
Anyone who visited my hometown of Hamilton at the West end of Lake Ontario a couple of years ago would have had a hard time believing that the lake levels were going down. Manitoulin Island, which divides Lake Huron from Georgian Bay, is the largest freshwater island in the world, itself containing over 100 lakes, some of which have islands of their own.
So true. I live in Sudbury and have camped on Georgian Bay most of my life. The water levels have dropped significantly. However, people think that was caused by "climate change", but ignore a lot of other facts. The Great Lakes are a major shipping route. For a long time, ships were getting bigger, heavier, and had deeper hauls but the depth of the water never changed. There were several channels that were dredged deeper, and wider to accommodate those larger ships. It turned out to be an environmental disaster. The dredging not only made the channels deeper and wider, it increased the flow of water they did not suspect. The increase of flow flushed millions of cubic tones of sediment and increased the draining of the lakes. The shore line did not drop 3-5 meters because of "climate change", it happened because large channels were dredged deeper and the more flow of water flushed out even. You wont hear much about that because it was kept all hush hung due to lawsuits.
My wife and I attended a meeting a few years ago where the guest speaker explained that most of the water going into the lakes is melted glacial ice, buried underground (glacial moraine). Only about 1% is from new rain and snow. Some of the water is sometimes diverted to the Mississippi and some is drawn off for bottled water.
I live on the north shore of Lake Erie. The lake can go from being flat as a mill pond to raging whitecaps in a matter of a couple of hours. There are over 200 shipwrecks on Lake Erie, dating mostly from the time when long range weather prediction didn’t exist.
Might help if the named ALL the lakes, not to mention the rivers. They missed the smallest of the lakes, Lake Saint Claire. There are also rivers that make up parts of the waterway. The Saint Mary's River connects Lake Superior to Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The Saint. Claire River connects Lake Huron to Lake St. Claire, the Detroit River connects Lake St. Claire to Lake Erie, the Niagara River connects Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, then finally the St. Lawrence River connects Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean. Lake St. Claire is not technically considered a Great Lake, although it is an integral part of the waterway.
I don't have any specific videos to recommend, but there's probably something on these topics. The Great Lakes don't naturally flow toward the Mississippi at all; just the St. Lawrence. However, the two systems are connected due to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the reversal of the Chicago River. If you want to learn about the pollution of the area, there is probably information out there about what happened on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland in 1969.
The lakes are tributary to the St-Lawrence river, not the Mississippi. As an Australian you can sort of get that in North-Am. we do things on a grand scale... About 80% of all pollutants originate in the USA, but, they slowly work their way to the St-Lawrence. pollution
Everybody saying that the Mississippi River is not connected to the Great Lakes are forgetting that the Chicago River reversal links the Mississippi basin with the Great Lakes basin. Why do you people think authorities are so paranoid about the Asian Carp that infest the Mississippi making their way into the Lakes? That said, the overall amount of great lakes water allowed to flow down the Chicago river is miniscule compared to the amount of water that flows out via the St Lawrence Seaway. You were talking about the cold Lake Superior water and thinking it freezes over in the winter. Not as much as you'd think. There is so much water in that lake that bringing the temp down to freezing is actually difficult. (It takes a lot of energy to change the state of water between solid and liquid) The shallow areas around the coastlines freeze up solid every year, but much of the lake stays open water in all but the coldest of winters. The yearly peak ice cover that occurs in late February/early March averages about 50% of the surface area. On the flip side, the massive amount of water doesn't get enough heat energy in the summer to significantly warm the water either. I've done some diving up there in the hottest part of summer and below the thermocline it was bone chilling cold. Above the thermocline wasn't much better. And that bit about climate change dropping lake levels is just a load of bunk. The lakes go through a years long cycle of high and low water levels. Recent years have seen high levels, but back around 2000 they had water levels so low that marinas were needing to dredge so boats could enter and the big lake freighters had to take smaller loads than normal so they wouldn't draw too much draft while in ports. Another thing to consider is that even 10,000 years later, the land around the Great Lakes is still slowly rebounding after being driven down by the weight of the glaciers. This gradual change in elevation needs to be taken into account while assessing the long term average of lake levels.
And, try to imagine the volume of water going over Niagara Falls when you think the only lake after the Falls is Lake Ontario. Other than man-made routes it's the only way for all that water to reach the St Lawrence river and the sea. Small wonder it's been able to, and still does, grind it's way up from Lake Ontario and will one day be at Fort Erie, ON/Buffalo, NY..
@@jameslatimer3600 And when it does reach that point, if people are still around, they are going to have a problem. The Niagara Escarpment (the rock that Niagara Falls is eroding away) is basically a natural dam holding back Lake Erie. When the falls reach Lake Erie, much of Lake will be drained away quickly. It's surface is at an elevation of 569 ft. above sea level. The surface of Lake Ontario is at 243 ft. above sea level, a difference of 326 ft. The deepest spot in Lake Erie is only 210 ft. deep and the average depth is only 62 ft. What will be left initially will be the deep portion of the lake and a river with rapids and waterfalls all the way to the other end of the lake. Eventually the water erosion will eliminate the 'hump' of land between the lower Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, eliminating the lake entirely. I'm not familiar with the rock under the Detroit River so I can't say how fast it will erode away, but eventually it will get to a point where it starts to drain Lakes Huron and Michigan. They won't disappear entirely since their max depths are below sea level, but it will leave current port cities on the lakes high and dry. Transportation of goods will become orders of magnitude harder. But don't worry about it too much. At the current rate of erosion, Niagara Falls won't reach Lake Erie for another 50,000 years. And by then we'll probably have plans to put a dam in place to prevent everything I mentioned. 😁
The Ice Age glaciers not only created the Great Lakes, scraped moat of the soil off the Canadian Shield. The area of Ontario where I live have geological formations called drumlins These hills were formed by the glaciers
That's also true of the Oak Ridges Morian (sp?) which stretches from the Niagara Escarpment ridge tom the Bruce Peninsula (running pretty mu north to south) to about Port Hope on Lake Ontario. Those high points are the reason the water has to take the route it does.
Seems like ages ago now but I was on a ship once which sailed from Sault Ste. Marie, across placid Lake Huron, past industrial Detroit, across Lake Erie, through the Welland canal, across the churning Lake Ontario to bustling Toronto and up the lovely St Lawrence river, past the Thousand Islands with all those amazing cabins, past proud Montréal and the beautiful old Ville De Québec, and then finally, finally out into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to swing around and stop in charming little Summerside Prince Edward Island with it's rich red earth and free running horses. I made one of those corny photo montages that were so popular when TH-cam first began. Here it is! th-cam.com/video/vWmDuR4edEk/w-d-xo.html The Great Lakes are amazing. They don't swell and roll like the ocean but they are awesome for their scale and the variety of vessels upon them.
The water in the Great Lakes is not in anyway connected naturally to the Mississippi River watershed. The Ohio River is part of the Mississippi River watershed as well. The water in the lakes is considered to be ancient water, since the majority of the water is the exact same melt water from the last Ice Age. It takes over 200 years for water to flow through the system, and even then, it's only 1% of the water volume which is all "new water" from current precipitation. The Lakes are on the edge of the Canadian Shield, and you can follow a line to the Northwest through Canada and find the other very large lakes present along the edge of the shield. There's so many lakes in the Canadian Shield, that I don't know if there's an actual count on them.
Living in Hamilton on the shore of Lake Ontario... Every now and then you hear a story of someone fishing out a giant goldfish, like, the size of a basketball sized goldfish.
I'm a Canadian truck driver and I've come across signs marking the watershed, which means, all water south of that point flows south, and any water north of that point flows north. The watershed is not a straight line across the map east to west, but rather s zigzsgging line, but its interesting to note there is such a thing. I know for a fact that everyone drives right past that sign totally oblivious to its existence or significance.
You'd never know the water levels were going down in Lake Huron. In Goderich, there's virtually no beaches left from the rising waters. There was so much more sand back when I was a kid in the 80's/90's.
Used to go to the Sleeping Bear Dunes at Lake Michigan every summer as a kid. My grandparents lived in Frankfort Michigan where the Dunes are located. Fun times.
There is a council between American and Canada that regulates the Great Lakes. Nevada wanted to run a pipeline from Lake Superior to Nevada to provide them with fresh water but the council put a stop to it making illegal for any state or province that is not on the Great Lakes to use any of the water. There are a lot of projects going on to get rid of invasive species and pollutants.
Nature has blessed the Canadian side of the Great Lakes with the most beautiful natural sandy beaches. One is 2 hours east of Toronto on Lake Ontario. It is located in Sandbanks Provincial Park. Beyond beautiful. Toronto has amazing beaches. All natural sand.
Actually, North and South America are generally considered separate continents, and taken together are called the AMERICAS. So, calling them just Americas' inland seas is totally appropriate (unless there is something in South America, I don't know about, that competes in scale). It does NOT say, The United States of America's (USA's) inland seas. Notice they don't even call it North America's inland seas. Don't confuse the AMERICAS as in both North and South America with the USA's nickname of America. Notice my use of plural S, possessive apostrophe S, and possessive S apostrophe. From Mother Jones: "America, as a shorthand for the United States, has a way of raising hackles around the globe. The Americas stretch from Canada to South America’s southern cone. Why should one country, accounting for a third of their population and less than a quarter of their land, have a nomenclatural claim on the whole hemisphere? To many in the United States, such complaints-as voiced by Canadians and Chileans and any number of the 600 million other Americans-seem misplaced. America is right there in the full name of the country. What else would you call it? Yet the United States hasn’t always gone by America. That name rose to its current ubiquity only in the 20th century. It did so in response to the United States becoming an empire." By the way, I was born in Michigan and lived within a couple miles of Lake Michigan until my 30's. The only comparison you can make is to an ocean.
Lake huron and the surrounding region sits on a massive meteorite impact crater. Such an impact melts the earths' crust so metals tend to pool out. The region is rich in ore and produced a lot of iron for two world wars. The First Nations/Natives in the area of Wisconsin found little to no flint for tool making, but discovered natural copper deposits and learned to heat, hammer and anneal the copper to produce knives, fish hooks, arrowheads and spearheads.
Sea Lamprey have rows of teeth very similar to shark teeth. And what they do is attach them selves with that sucker mouth to it's prey and just start chewing...which could you imagine if they did that to a swimmer.
Great video! To get a little perspective on size, Superior is twice the size of the country of Switzerland! Massive large tankers and other vessels sail these waters. If you get a chance watch the video of Gordon Lightfoot’s “ The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald “. There are also documentary videos about the sinking of this big tanker. Storms on these lakes are truly frightening.
The Gales of November Remember. In 1918 there was a Three day Storm on ALL 5 Great Lakes. Over 25 ships Were lost with Over 250 people died. Back then there was NO Two way radiios/ walkie-talkies. Th help Captains.
Erie is shallow and angry. She tosses and turns and NO ONE disregards her. But she keeps us safe and warm and warm and cool throughout the year till wet have to handle Weather belts or summer rains.
The video ignores many things, just off the top of my head.... the 30,000 islands in Georgian Bay (part of Lake Huron) and and that much of the heating & cooling for the buildings in Toronto's CBD utilizes lake water from Lake Ontario. Friends have a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay and swimming can be a challenge - the water can be quite pleasant but the a storm blows though and the next day the water has churned and to reference an episode of Seinfeld, men can expect serious "shrinkage". I see that Geoff M recommends the NFB short film "Paddle to the Sea" which was originally a book about a First Nations boy who carves a model canoe with a boy in it and launches it to sail through the Great Lakes to reach the ocean. I'd suggest you give a listen to the song "The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot (in the vaguest of Aussie terms and my limited knowledge of Aussie folk singers the The Bushwhackers), it's based on a true event that occurred in the Great Lakes - fair warning you may be in tears at the end.
I get my water from Lake Michigan. I’m about 35 miles north of Chicago on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan watershed historically doesn’t flow into the Mississippi or Ohio Rivers. The flow of the Chicago River now flows away from Lake Michigan rather than into it due to a series of locks.
I live near Lake Erie. It is shallow, and it runs southwest to northeast in length, so that regular winds cause staggering, nay, eye-popping, storms. There are irregular tidal swings called seiches that drown out low-lying urban areas in Toledo and Buffalo. Lake Erie water is polluted so that effectively there is no longer commercial fishing permitted. Lots of mercury from Detroit's automobile battery industry sits in the muck at the bottom of the lake. Mercury was once used to coat the lead battery plates of cars and trucks so as to render them more electrically conductive. Lake water levels tend to vary over the decades. The mussels do not cause water levels to vary, but do filter a staggering volume of water, and they thus concentrate a lot of nasty pollutants into their shells, which form truly impressive volumes of deposits. The lamprey eel approaches fishes and bathers, drills a hole into their sides, and sucks out vast amounts of blood. Thus, all rivers leading into and out of the lakes have river sections that are electrically charged to discourage lampreys from going upstream to lay eggs. A recent concern is that a recent migrant to North America are the Asian Carps, that grow fast, and leap up into the air--in large numbers--out of the water and smack motor boating sports fishermen in their torsos and heads, frequently with disabling violence . The Asian Carp are not yet in the lakes, and super electric water fences are being installed on the Chicago River to prevent their movement from the Mississippi River into the Great Lakes. On the Mississippi people shoot at leaping Carp with carbines, pistols, crossbows, and regular longbows. The Chicago used to drain Chicago's Cholera-ridden sewers into Lake Michigan, but 125 years ago had its flow reversed into the Chicago Canal, southward, into the Mississippi , so as to pollute the drinking waters of St. Louis.
Lake Michigan does flow into the Mississippi River, but that is an artificial outlet, and only one river--the Chicago River. The flow by this source is strictly curtailed by a lock in downtown Chicago. Since Chicago is the source of two watersheds, the Chicago River was switched from emptying into Lake Michigan and polluting the drinking water at Chicago, i.e. drinking water from Lake Michigan, sewage down the Chicago River to the Mississippi River and eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
I live in Holland Michigan and learned a few things. 1. That Lake Superior has half the water of all five together. 2, there there is enough water in the lakes to cover America up to 3 meters. Not sure I actually believe that, but ok. Last year the water level raised a few feet. Have not check this year.
Lake of the Woods area, westward off Lake Superior and forming part of the US-Canada border touching Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ontario covers a huge area but is broken up by a myriad of connected lakes, is pretty much another great lake.
I despair with an education system that allows someone to think that the Mississippi is connected to the Great Lakes. I rember learning about the Great Lakes in primary school in 1960. There was a fabulous book back then called Paddle To The Sea by Holling Clancy Holling that taught us all about the stories of the lakes and the people that lived there. Geography has been dumbed down in recent decades.
@@maryellis8902 I remembered the book so vividly from my childhood, I sought it out as an adult and bought a copy. I still have it. It is such a treasure from a wonderful husband and wife team The Holling Clancy is him, the last Holling is her. They were both illustrators and worked together on those beautiful watercolors and drawings so that no one can tell which bits were done by him, and which bits were done by her. Her name was Lucille Webster, and should be remembered, because while their many books were mostly from him, with the stories and concepts from him and then both of them creating the illustrations seamlessly, their close relationship was central to their lifetime of collaboration as artists as well as man and wife, entwined in what looks like the perfect union.
the water levels of the great lakes are not declining. the outflow is controlled by dams and the water level regularly flood beaches for entire seasons, keeping in mind that there really is no tide to speak of.
There are in fact a number of diversions of water from the Great Lakes by cities to provide water for industrial of municipal purposes. They are supposed to return the water to the lakes but often do not. The biggest one is the Chicago River diversion which allows Chicago to flush its waste water into the Mississippi River by reversing the flow of the Chicago River and using the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the Illinois River. Cities around the Great Lakes outside the Great Lakes watershed have gotten water from the lakes often against strong opposition from people who live on the lakes who don't want a drop in the level of the lakes which could imperil their water supply. They usually lose the battle against new water diversions.
There's already talks of altering the treaty to preserve the great lakes. Canada usually has to cow down to the will of the US. There's always the pretense of cordiality, but if it wants something, it's going to apply pressure. And it has the power to apply a great deal of pressure. And we're small enough that it doesn't take much.
I was born in northern Michigan and unfortunately I was too young to remember it. We were an Air Force family and right before I was born my dad got orders to DC so I was 4 weeks old when my family left Michigan. My mom tells stories of my dad and his friends driving their trucks over the Great Lakes during winter. That’s how frozen they get
LOL @ the video commentator saying the Great Lakes border 8 states but totally ignoring what borders these lakes on the other side. That's so typical of the American mindset. Their concept of the world often doesn't extend beyond their borders. They have a vague idea that Canada exists but way in the distance near the North Pole. It explains why you constantly meet Americans who wonder where all the snow is in the middle of summer; shocked that Canada is right there. They think it's a 1000 mile journey to reach Canada.
Knew this was an American based video. Love how Lake Superior gets most of it's water from some unnamed source in the north. Whatever that unknown blob is to the north is never named nor do they wish to share the four of them that also are partly in that unknown blobs territory. Final insult is showing part of the Niagara Falls that belong to that anonymous blob and not showing the American owned falls. At least they admitted there was an unknown blob of land to the north. OOPS, sorry we do get named when it comes time to pay for cleanup. Glad they didn't mention where the St Lawrence empties in the Atlantic. Fox News would call for bombing us for stealing the water from those American lakes.
Of course we get named when it's time for paying the bill for clean up. After all, they wanted to frack for oil in the St. Lawrence, and I believe they still have a pending lawsuit going somewhere to get permission to do so. And only in the US can private citizens OWN the 'water rights', whereas here all waterways, (and I think it is 10 feet of shore as well) automatically belong to the government.
@@helmutvogel901 Good thing there are actual treaties and rock solid agreements regarding the great lakes. American companies can cry all they want, the treaties are there.
Yeah I was gonna say you know its an American video when there's almost no mention of Canada or any info from the Canadian side of the lakes. I feel like Georgian Bay would have been something to talk about on this.
OJB, the Lower 48 3 meters deep, or the entire Western Hemisphere in .30 of a meter. The H.O.M.E.S. thing is a reference back to my generation, and maybe today as well, when we were given this mnemonic device to remember the names of the 5--homes. A little free and interesting info here--at 2:57, notice the island above the "U" and the "P". That's one of our national parks, named Isle Royale, accessible only by float plane or ferry--one of 3 of our 63 in the same situation. In the original French, it would be "eel roy-AL", but it got Anglicized to "I'll Royal". The access points are either from the tip of the peninsula south of the "E", which is in the state of Michigan, or directly to the NW, which is a town in the state of Minnesota. At the southern tip of L. Michigan is Chicago. The Mississippi R. is about a 3-hour drive to the west. However, canals were dug to connect them about 150 years ago.
I am not sure, as I have seen your videos about Canadian geography, whether you actually understand that the St. Lawrence River links the Atlantic Ocean into what is now the St. Lawrence Seaway (started 1954, completed 1959). This series of locks enabled a deal of commerce over the years. The St. Lawrence Seaway is why the Great Lakes are so important economically to both US and Canadians in those regions. However, commerce has also entailed heartbreak, as another commenter has mentioned... Here is a link to Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the of Edmund Fitzgerald".. th-cam.com/video/9vST6hVRj2A/w-d-xo.html
The St. Lawrence River really only connects the ocean to Lake Ontario. You can't sail a boat/ship up Niagara Falls. Or at least you couldn't. New York City really got the jump on things when they dug the Erie Canal in upstate New York. Now you can take a boat up the Hudson River, cut across the canal, and enter Lake Erie, giving you access to 4/5 of the lakes. Just a couple years later, the Canadians built the Welland Canal, that connects Ontario to Erie. But Canada doesn't have a huge city at the end of the SLS to take advantage of this like New York can at the end of the Hudson River. New York instantly became a key city for worldwide shipping. Also the Erie Canal opened up the "west" for westward expansion across the USA, as depicted at the beginning of the movie How The West Was Won. The Great Lakes could take you as far west as Chicago or Duluth, depending on which direction you wanted to go. Since the USA had just bought the Louisiana territory from France it doubled the size of the country and gave us the Mississippi watershed (priceless). This was considered the "west" at the time. Once the real "out west" opened up, the previous "west" became known as the Midwest. Today, Americans and Canadians use the Great Lakes for all sorts of things. If nothing else, plenty of recreation.
(watching these in the wrong order) yeah, Mississippi is separate. you'd probably enjoy looking at a Great Lakes watershed map - it lets you see where the ridge lines that split the rainfall are. Chicago is one of the closest points to the Mississippi watershed.
Yeah, there are two things in this that I'll comment on: 1) the "lakes shrinking" due to global climate change... warm air holds more water so that results in water evaporating, it also means less rain (generally) so lakes and rivers shrink, melting ice causes sea levels to rise, but fresh water to shrink. (simplified explanation) 2) the pollutants... in the past we didn't always know the dangers of "thing x" and certainly didn't consider where it went. So older, more dangerous, and often more heavily used stuff got into the lakes, and other ecosystems... and there isn't really a way to get it out. Al least not any time soon. Enjoying these reacts, and this video contained a few facts I don't recall ever hearing before.
You may get some request to respond to " The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Canadian Folk Star Gordon Lightfoot , true story very well written and detailed song describes the weather and the conditions of Lake Superior hauntingly well...so well in fact the song stops most Canadians in their tracks and even some of the younger generation don't recognize it, but they know they've heard it in the background somewhere ( maybe a wedding or a funearal) yes it's that popular and critically acclaimed. It's old Gord's Opus!!!! Story telling at it's finest, actually you'd be hard pressed to find a bad Gordon Lightfoot song! So if your interested in relating better with us Canucks listening to this Canadian ICON might give you some insight to the Canadian soul!! Sundown is the wife's fav by him.
The Great Lakes *don't* drain into to the Mississippi river. If you pull up a watershed map of North America, you'll see that the Great Lakes are part of a separate watershed.
if your in Michigan there is a surface fresh water source with in 2 miles of you at all times. and lake superior is also known as the lake that never gives up its dead. look up the song the edman Fitzgerald lots of history here kinda cool .
The river they feed into is called "The Saint Lawrence Seaway". Nothing at all to do with the Mississippi River, I'm afraid. lol. The Sea Lamprey, with that nasty looking mouth, attaches itself to fish, sucks them practically dry, then moves on to another one, leaving it's last host to perish from wounds that won't heal. (if you're Canadian, you learn this stuff. lol.) One last fun fact, although I can't recall the exact numbers... if you put a drop of water at the 'beginning' of Lake Superior, on average it takes, (and here is where my recollection/accuracy suffers), Many decades, as in a century or two(or more??? to make its way through the 5 lake system... sorry I can't tell you the accurate number.🤔🤷🏼♂ Ok.. it was bugging me I couldn't remember the number/time, so a quick search gave me this... "The average drop of water takes 173 years to pass through Lake Superior. The average drop of water takes 204 years to pass from Lake Superior to the ocean." Wow, 1 3/4 centuries to make it out of Superior, then a "mere" 31 years to get through the rest of 'em. 👍🏼✌🏼🇨🇦
The muscles were harming the ecology quite a bit, but now they've reached an equilibrium and they're less of an issue. They're actually one of the main things contributing to filtering crap out of the water.
Lake Michigan on on the east coast of Wisconsin and the Mississippi River is on the west coast of Wisconsin. No, Lake Michigan does not flow into the Mississippi river. It does however flow into the Chicago river. Interestingly the Fox river in WI flows north into the bay of Green Bay which connects to lake Michigan.
The Mississippi River starts at Lake Itasca west of Lake Superior. The Mississippi is NOT connected to the Great Lakes. The narrator neglects to state that the United States are in GREAT part to blame for the pollution of the Great Lakes! Although Canada polluted the Great Lakes, it was nowhere near the extent of that of the United States. In the past the US had had a deaf ear to Canada's concerns about the lakes we share.
Yep. The Mississippi drainage basin (flows south) to the Gulf of Mexico is a completely different drainage basin from the Great Lakes/St-Lawrence drainage basin (flows east) which flows to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the North Atlantic beyond it.
Well, it is not naturally connected, but a canal was built to connect the two allowing barge traffic to access both waterway systems nearing 200 years ago.
In the 90s we couldn’t swim at the South End of Lake Michigan because of E. coli and pollution. It’s been cleaned up a ton the last 10 years. The North is always cleaner and has always been nice. Muscles are really bad and the biggest problem
Industrial Pollution along the Great Lakes peaked in the late 1960's early 1970's - at that time you could neither fish nor swim in Lake Eerie. In 1969 the Cuyahoga River famously caught fire and burnt hot enough to destroy railway bridges. Things have come a long way.
Access to water in the shared basins is agreed to by treaty. You're correct. Canada's going to make a fortune in the next hundred years with all that water being exported.
When the United States decides to take water from the Great Lakes, Canadian opinion will be accepted if it agrees with US opinion. Otherwise, it will be ignored.
The Great Lakes flow out through the St. Lawrence River, which forms part of the border between the US and Canada and then into the Atlantic Ocean near Nova Scotia .None of them flow out through the Mississippi River
I really like people defending their body’s of water and respect that. When you get to see any of the Great Lakes in person, clear day or November gales. You will be in awe.
The great lakes do not connect to the Mississippi River basin. They are separate drainage systems.
Chicago connected them so they could have a green river for st patricks day.
There is a canal allowing barges to transit between the two
Look up the Great Loop, a mostly inland navigation doing a loop around the eastern US using the Mississippi and Hudson rivers,.
Well, I heard, at the meeting we attended, that if the lakes reach a certain high level some of the water is drain, ultimately, into the Mississippi through a canal system, the Des Plaines & Illinois rivers - I think at Chicago. It's part of the "inland waterway", which I do know exists. If that's right there is a connection, correct?
@@Steve-eq8iz Funny, San Antonio, Texas, has an oxbow in the river there. They have built a canal across the narrow part of the oxbow creating an island park. They also dye their river green for St. Patrick's Day. It was great to sit/lunch on the balcony of the Hard Rock Café , overlooking the river and the partying.
Look into videos on how Chicago reversed the flow of a river in 1900 so that sewage from the city would not pollute Lake Michigan, the source of fresh drinking water. There is also a massive “deep tunnel” under Chicago that holds up to 2.4 billion gallons (over 9 billion liters) of storm runoff so that the locks to Lake Michigan rarely needed to handle overflow from the Chicago River. A lot of amazing engineering.
You should watch a documentary called "Unsalted" about surfing on the great lakes. You'd be shocked to see how big and consistent the waves can be on all five lakes. I've personally surfed three of them.
I lived on Lake Superior for four years. On the hottest days of summer, I never stepped more than ankle deep into it because it's so cold.
I live on the St. Clair River, it connects Lake Huron, Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River to Lake Erie. Good fishing and a lot of fun to boat on.
The beautiful blue St.Clair River, I grew up in Marine City, 💙 I loved looking across the river to Canada and watching the freighters 😢 I miss it. Peace✌️Gary😊
@@GaryCain-qf5vi I went to high school in MC, Holy Cross. I live in East China now, just outside os St. Clair.
I know Southampton, ON have had a lot of water sports for a long time.
I was blessed to grow up on the Great Lakes, and though I live in Florida now, I have a house on huron still for summers. They are truly magnificent and magical, especially in the summer time. Winter is interesting and beautiful, but that weather is harsh!
The great lakes were collectively named centuries ago. Early explorers of North America were planning on walking to Canada when they were stopped in their tracks by huge bodies of water and they said, (in a sarcastic tone),
"GREAT! LAKES!"
-this is one of those completely unknown facts
Please watch "The Wreck of Edmond Fitzgerald". It's by Canadian singer/songwriter Gordon Lightfoot. It tells the tale of a tanker on Lake Superior, and the weather that sailors face on the Great Lakes.
Quibble - it was a freighter (solid loads) rather than a tanker (liquids)
“Lake Superior doesn't give up her dead.”
There is a channel that connects Mississippi to Lake Michigan, but the natural flow of the Great Lakes goes down the St Lawrence River.
I grew up just north of Lake Erie. The beaches there were like ocean beaches, complete with lighthouses, with no sign of even any of the islands between the Canadian and American sides from the shore. If you could see past the horizon, you might be able to see some of the massive ships using the lakes for transport. There were even large waves (created by wind currents vs lunar gravity). Farther to the east the Lake flows into rivers you can easiy cross by bridge or ferry, eventually joining Lake Ontario where, of course, you get Niagara Falls. The Falls were close enough that I went there so many times I sort of took them for granted. Since moving to Australia, and seeing the lakes, falls, etc through the eyes of my Aussie family, I have much more appreciation for them.
The levels of the Great Lakes fluctuate on a regular basis. A few years ago they were at what were called historic lows (Note: The lake levels have only been monitor since about 1871, so that is not that long a time). Now, they are near their historic highs, similar to what they were in the 1990s. when lakeside apartments in Chicago were being flooded by high waves. Wave heights of over 40 feet have been measured on the lakes. The big bulk carriers are called "footers" as they are 1,000 feet long (305 meters) and sized to just pass through the Sault Ste Marie Locks. The only connection of the lakes to the Mississippi River system is through the Chicago River and the Cal-Sag channel which connects eventually connects to the Illinois River which drains into the Mississippi. As a result of these connections, both through the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the Saint Lawrence Seaway system, it is possible for shipbuilders on the Great Lakes to build ocean-going ships for the U.S. Navy. During World War 2, a fair number of submarines were built in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, and then they traveled down through the river system to enter the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans.
It's an interesting tidbit, but the land surrounding the Great Lakes is actually still rising from being pressed down from the ice age glaciers.
Don’t forget about the other Canadian Great Lakes, The Great Slave Lake, and the Great Bear Lake, those two are absolutely massive as well
And, Lake Winnipeg.
those arnt considered part of the great lakes due to not being part of the water system
@@j1r2000
Fair enough.
Perhaps he should have referred to them as 'other great Canadian lakes'.
@@j1r2000 Ever look at how the Great Lakes, Lake Winnipeg/Manitoba, Great/Lesser Slave Lake, Reindeer Lake, Great Bear Lake and Lake Athabasca are all in a line from southeast to northwest? Hard to believe they aren't all related in some way. I don't think it's crazy to think the glaciers moved in that direction when they retreated and carved them all out in series.
@@j1r2000 They're separate, but they're pretty great in my opinion. The main thing against them is they're remote and mostly landlocked.
Almost makes up for the USA controlling all of Lake Michigan, but not really.
Since you have been enjoying Canadiana and have hit the Great Lakes I would like to suggest Paddle to the Sea on the National Film Board TH-cam channel
I loved that film!
Me too. th-cam.com/video/uhjb1IG1pnQ/w-d-xo.html
There's also The Rise and Fall of the Great Lakes. Also Bill Mason and NFB.
Got to love Bill Mason!
Is that the carved canoe and paddler that is released in the snow? I cherish the memory of that video.
Just to clear things up, the Mississippi River does not connect to the Great Lakes at all and is not part of the Great Lakes water shed. A lot, and I mean a lot of the info in this vid is wrong. Yes, the last glaciers did carve out some of the Great Lakes, but the basin was there long before the last glacier and were created over million of years by tectonic plate movements. The term "basin" has geographic meaning, and it doesn't mean carved out.
Interesting fact, there are some archeological studies of the Great Lakes that show there were people living in that area long before there were lakes, but there were water ways. The basin was there, but the water came after the glaciers melted.
www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090608182543.htm
Anyone interested in studying Canadian / American relations, they would do well learning the history of the Great Lakes and how both countries share them and how they were divided between the two countries.
OJB, I love that you have interest in learning Canadian geography and its history, but PLEASE, PLEASE, check the sources, especially if it comes from the U.S. There was no research done in this vid, the person who made it took tid bits of information off the internet and made a vid.
I have to say this, you can never understand why they call them the Great Lakes until you actually see them. I have never seen the ocean, but I would like to think the closest thing to it is the Great Lakes. They are beautiful!
While it is not naturally connected, a canal was built to connect the two allowing barge traffic to access both waterway systems nearing 200 years ago.
I've studied geology and this is absolutely correct. Before the Great Lakes existed and prior to the Pleistocene ice age there were ancient river systems where the Great Lakes are now. They created a series of shallow valleys or basins in the region may have connected with the ancient Mississippi River. A pre-glacial river called the Teays River flowed across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois into the pre-glacial Mississippi. A river called the ancient Lake Michigan River ran down the center of the Lake Michigan basin into the Teays River, Repeated glaciations of the region by ice sheets widened and deepened the basins now occupied by the Great Lakes and when the ice sheets melted back glacial moraines were left behind helping to form the future Great Lakes. Each glaciation of the four that occurred during the Pleistocene created ancestors of the present Great Lakes which were larger than the ones during the previous glaciation. During the end of the last, or Wisconsinan, glaciation huge amounts of meltwater from the terminus of the ice sheet flowed into the upper Mississippi River and its tributaries from the glacial lobe occupying the Lake Superior basin until the ice sheet melted back and the Mississippi drainage basin was finally cut off from the Great Lakes drainage basin. The upper Mississippi in Minnesota didn't form until only a few thousand ago when the great ice sheet finally melted back from that region.
Lake Superior is so deep compared to its surface area that it never gets very warm at all - and experiences winter temperatures where the lake partially freezes over.
It does occasionally freeze over completely - but apparently not in the 21st century.
Lake Michigan does not naturally drain into the Mississippi river basin -
there is a Navigational lock that connects a canal that leads to a tributary of the Mississippi to the lake- near Chicago.
One of the oldest natural trade routes connecting the 2 drainages is at Portage, Wisconsin -
were the Fox River (Draining to Lake Michigan) passes within about 1.5 miles (2.4KM) of the Wisconsin River -
which flows into the Mississippi.
I seem to recall when I lived in Wisconsin years ago, there was a controversy about those locks that connect to the Mississippi. I think I recall an invasive species that was allowed to get into Lake Michigan from the Mississippi via those locks. Is that still an issue?
@@leroyjames2825 There are several invasive species issues - the lamprey eel was considered a huge problem in the 1960's, later the zebra mussel was a major challenge and currently there is an ongoing battle with keeping the Asian Carp out of the lakes... each of these has been and are being countered with varying degrees of success and failure.
Actually there is a tri point on the great divide in the rocky mountains(which is the bc/alberta border) were one side of the mountain feeds water to the Pacific, on side goes north to the arctic and one side goes west to the hudson bay.
There's a similar point near Hibbing, Minn. Some water flows to the Mississippi, some flows to Lake Superior and some flows to the Red River of the North to Winnipeg and eventually Hudson Bay.
Fun facts the video didn’t mention: Lake Michigan is the only Great Lake entirely in the US and it is the most polluted of them all. The other 4 lakes are all in Ontario. Ontario is that big! Also, water levels in the lakes can be controlled by a series of dams that regulate how much water goes into the St.Lawrence. A few years ago we experienced very high water levels partly due the dams holding back much more water than usual to prevent cities like Montreal from severe flooding.
Lake Erie is the most polluted of the lake, followed by Ontario, Michigan and Huron are about the same, superior is the least because it's so big and cold it dilutes some pollution it takes in
Easy way to help remember order of Great Lakes: Lake Michigan never touches Ontario (province) and Lake Ontario never touches Michigan (state).
When friends of my parents visited and saw Lake Ontario he couldn't believe it was fresh water, he thought the only bodies of water that large were salt water. Lake Ontario has been cleaned up considerably, I remember in the 80s there were signs on the beaches and in the parks in Toronto forbidding swimming due to the pollution but it's safe to do so now.
I still wouldn't want to swim in it. Several cities dump their overflow of sewage into the lakes.
Even though zebra mussels as an invasive species, they have helped clean Lake Ontario and Erie.
Not after it rains.
it's because of some old sewer systems in toronto are still connected to rainwater sewers so when it rains hard too much water flows into the sewage treatment plant which overflows. it's poop pollution not toxic chemicals. they have spent years and years separating the systems.
Yes, I had a cousin from north Wales visiting us in Wasaga Beach. when we took him to the actual beach he asked what sea it was and whether we had tides. He was stunned to know he was looking at a relatively small bay, Nottawasaga Bay, part of the Georgian Bay shore line, and that Georgian Bay was just a part of Lake Huron. It's also where you'll find the thirty thousand islands which you can cruise.
Some of the lakes also have quite the history for shipwrecks. Ask A Mortician did a video on ‘the lake that never gives up its dead’ (something like that) and interviewed the (i think) grandson of a captain who is still down there with his ship
Song by Gordon Lightfoot. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Just the wrecks around Tobermory alone.
Anyone who visited my hometown of Hamilton at the West end of Lake Ontario a couple of years ago would have had a hard time believing that the lake levels were going down. Manitoulin Island, which divides Lake Huron from Georgian Bay, is the largest freshwater island in the world, itself containing over 100 lakes, some of which have islands of their own.
So true. I live in Sudbury and have camped on Georgian Bay most of my life. The water levels have dropped significantly. However, people think that was caused by "climate change", but ignore a lot of other facts. The Great Lakes are a major shipping route. For a long time, ships were getting bigger, heavier, and had deeper hauls but the depth of the water never changed. There were several channels that were dredged deeper, and wider to accommodate those larger ships. It turned out to be an environmental disaster. The dredging not only made the channels deeper and wider, it increased the flow of water they did not suspect. The increase of flow flushed millions of cubic tones of sediment and increased the draining of the lakes. The shore line did not drop 3-5 meters because of "climate change", it happened because large channels were dredged deeper and the more flow of water flushed out even. You wont hear much about that because it was kept all hush hung due to lawsuits.
My wife and I attended a meeting a few years ago where the guest speaker explained that most of the water going into the lakes is melted glacial ice, buried underground (glacial moraine). Only about 1% is from new rain and snow. Some of the water is sometimes diverted to the Mississippi and some is drawn off for bottled water.
I live on the north shore of Lake Erie. The lake can go from being flat as a mill pond to raging whitecaps in a matter of a couple of hours. There are over 200 shipwrecks on Lake Erie, dating mostly from the time when long range weather prediction didn’t exist.
Yup , we are neighbors.... Toronto (Woodbridge).
Might help if the named ALL the lakes, not to mention the rivers. They missed the smallest of the lakes, Lake Saint Claire. There are also rivers that make up parts of the waterway. The Saint Mary's River connects Lake Superior to Lake Michigan and Lake Huron. The Saint. Claire River connects Lake Huron to Lake St. Claire, the Detroit River connects Lake St. Claire to Lake Erie, the Niagara River connects Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, then finally the St. Lawrence River connects Lake Ontario to the Atlantic Ocean. Lake St. Claire is not technically considered a Great Lake, although it is an integral part of the waterway.
The muscles cleaned all of the particulate matter from the water which allows sun light to reach further down and causes algae blooms
Hi, from Michigan! Glad you were as impressed by our Great Lakes as we are by your wildlife... Including the dreaded Dropbears 😬. Good on ya, mate!
I don't have any specific videos to recommend, but there's probably something on these topics. The Great Lakes don't naturally flow toward the Mississippi at all; just the St. Lawrence. However, the two systems are connected due to the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the reversal of the Chicago River. If you want to learn about the pollution of the area, there is probably information out there about what happened on the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland in 1969.
Isn't that where they have the electric fence to keep out the Chinese Snakehead fish?
Watch Paddle to the Sea (1966) to see the journey water takes through the Great Lakes. It's on NFB TH-cam channel.
The lakes are tributary to the St-Lawrence river, not the Mississippi.
As an Australian you can sort of get that in North-Am. we do things on a grand scale...
About 80% of all pollutants originate in the USA, but, they slowly work their way to the St-Lawrence.
pollution
Everybody saying that the Mississippi River is not connected to the Great Lakes are forgetting that the Chicago River reversal links the Mississippi basin with the Great Lakes basin. Why do you people think authorities are so paranoid about the Asian Carp that infest the Mississippi making their way into the Lakes? That said, the overall amount of great lakes water allowed to flow down the Chicago river is miniscule compared to the amount of water that flows out via the St Lawrence Seaway.
You were talking about the cold Lake Superior water and thinking it freezes over in the winter. Not as much as you'd think. There is so much water in that lake that bringing the temp down to freezing is actually difficult. (It takes a lot of energy to change the state of water between solid and liquid) The shallow areas around the coastlines freeze up solid every year, but much of the lake stays open water in all but the coldest of winters. The yearly peak ice cover that occurs in late February/early March averages about 50% of the surface area. On the flip side, the massive amount of water doesn't get enough heat energy in the summer to significantly warm the water either. I've done some diving up there in the hottest part of summer and below the thermocline it was bone chilling cold. Above the thermocline wasn't much better.
And that bit about climate change dropping lake levels is just a load of bunk. The lakes go through a years long cycle of high and low water levels. Recent years have seen high levels, but back around 2000 they had water levels so low that marinas were needing to dredge so boats could enter and the big lake freighters had to take smaller loads than normal so they wouldn't draw too much draft while in ports. Another thing to consider is that even 10,000 years later, the land around the Great Lakes is still slowly rebounding after being driven down by the weight of the glaciers. This gradual change in elevation needs to be taken into account while assessing the long term average of lake levels.
And, try to imagine the volume of water going over Niagara Falls when you think the only lake after the Falls is Lake Ontario. Other than man-made routes it's the only way for all that water to reach the St Lawrence river and the sea. Small wonder it's been able to, and still does, grind it's way up from Lake Ontario and will one day be at Fort Erie, ON/Buffalo, NY..
@@jameslatimer3600 And when it does reach that point, if people are still around, they are going to have a problem. The Niagara Escarpment (the rock that Niagara Falls is eroding away) is basically a natural dam holding back Lake Erie. When the falls reach Lake Erie, much of Lake will be drained away quickly. It's surface is at an elevation of 569 ft. above sea level. The surface of Lake Ontario is at 243 ft. above sea level, a difference of 326 ft. The deepest spot in Lake Erie is only 210 ft. deep and the average depth is only 62 ft. What will be left initially will be the deep portion of the lake and a river with rapids and waterfalls all the way to the other end of the lake. Eventually the water erosion will eliminate the 'hump' of land between the lower Lake Erie and Lake Ontario, eliminating the lake entirely. I'm not familiar with the rock under the Detroit River so I can't say how fast it will erode away, but eventually it will get to a point where it starts to drain Lakes Huron and Michigan. They won't disappear entirely since their max depths are below sea level, but it will leave current port cities on the lakes high and dry. Transportation of goods will become orders of magnitude harder.
But don't worry about it too much. At the current rate of erosion, Niagara Falls won't reach Lake Erie for another 50,000 years. And by then we'll probably have plans to put a dam in place to prevent everything I mentioned. 😁
Fun fact...total shoreline for the lakes is 9930 miles long, nearly 16,000 km.
The Ice Age glaciers not only created the Great Lakes, scraped moat of the soil off the Canadian Shield. The area of Ontario where I live have geological formations called drumlins These hills were formed by the glaciers
That's also true of the Oak Ridges Morian (sp?) which stretches from the Niagara Escarpment ridge tom the Bruce Peninsula (running pretty mu north to south) to about Port Hope on Lake Ontario. Those high points are the reason the water has to take the route it does.
Seems like ages ago now but I was on a ship once which sailed from Sault Ste. Marie, across placid Lake Huron, past industrial Detroit, across Lake Erie, through the Welland canal, across the churning Lake Ontario to bustling Toronto and up the lovely St Lawrence river, past the Thousand Islands with all those amazing cabins, past proud Montréal and the beautiful old Ville De Québec, and then finally, finally out into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence to swing around and stop in charming little Summerside Prince Edward Island with it's rich red earth and free running horses. I made one of those corny photo montages that were so popular when TH-cam first began. Here it is! th-cam.com/video/vWmDuR4edEk/w-d-xo.html The Great Lakes are amazing. They don't swell and roll like the ocean but they are awesome for their scale and the variety of vessels upon them.
The water in the Great Lakes is not in anyway connected naturally to the Mississippi River watershed. The Ohio River is part of the Mississippi River watershed as well. The water in the lakes is considered to be ancient water, since the majority of the water is the exact same melt water from the last Ice Age. It takes over 200 years for water to flow through the system, and even then, it's only 1% of the water volume which is all "new water" from current precipitation. The Lakes are on the edge of the Canadian Shield, and you can follow a line to the Northwest through Canada and find the other very large lakes present along the edge of the shield. There's so many lakes in the Canadian Shield, that I don't know if there's an actual count on them.
Living in Hamilton on the shore of Lake Ontario... Every now and then you hear a story of someone fishing out a giant goldfish, like, the size of a basketball sized goldfish.
I'm a Canadian truck driver and I've come across signs marking the watershed, which means, all water south of that point flows south, and any water north of that point flows north. The watershed is not a straight line across the map east to west, but rather s zigzsgging line, but its interesting to note there is such a thing. I know for a fact that everyone drives right past that sign totally oblivious to its existence or significance.
Where it flows away from the Great Lakes was called Rupert's Land. Everything that flowed to Hudson Bay belonged to Hudson's Bay Company.
You'd never know the water levels were going down in Lake Huron. In Goderich, there's virtually no beaches left from the rising waters. There was so much more sand back when I was a kid in the 80's/90's.
Yeah, last time I was at Georgian Bay and Lake Huron a couple years ago, the water was so high that beaches we used to walk on were completely gone.
Used to go to the Sleeping Bear Dunes at Lake Michigan every summer as a kid. My grandparents lived in Frankfort Michigan where the Dunes are located. Fun times.
There is a council between American and Canada that regulates the Great Lakes. Nevada wanted to run a pipeline from Lake Superior to Nevada to provide them with fresh water but the council put a stop to it making illegal for any state or province that is not on the Great Lakes to use any of the water. There are a lot of projects going on to get rid of invasive species and pollutants.
The council is between American great lake states and Ontario governments as far as I know.
Nature has blessed the Canadian side of the Great Lakes with the most beautiful natural sandy beaches. One is 2 hours east of Toronto on Lake Ontario. It is located in Sandbanks Provincial Park. Beyond beautiful. Toronto has amazing beaches. All natural sand.
The south side of Long Point, on Lake Erie, is a sandy beach 20 miles long.
Canadians do not call them "America's Inland Seas", eh. :)
yea the're Canada's inland seas
@@j1r2000 How about North America's? They are not by any means entirely Canadian either.
@@thomasmacdiarmid8251 sure
Actually, North and South America are generally considered separate continents, and taken together are called the AMERICAS. So, calling them just Americas' inland seas is totally appropriate (unless there is something in South America, I don't know about, that competes in scale). It does NOT say, The United States of America's (USA's) inland seas. Notice they don't even call it North America's inland seas. Don't confuse the AMERICAS as in both North and South America with the USA's nickname of America.
Notice my use of plural S, possessive apostrophe S, and possessive S apostrophe.
From Mother Jones:
"America, as a shorthand for the United States, has a way of raising hackles around the globe. The Americas stretch from Canada to South America’s southern cone. Why should one country, accounting for a third of their population and less than a quarter of their land, have a nomenclatural claim on the whole hemisphere?
To many in the United States, such complaints-as voiced by Canadians and Chileans and any number of the 600 million other Americans-seem misplaced. America is right there in the full name of the country. What else would you call it?
Yet the United States hasn’t always gone by America. That name rose to its current ubiquity only in the 20th century. It did so in response to the United States becoming an empire."
By the way, I was born in Michigan and lived within a couple miles of Lake Michigan until my 30's. The only comparison you can make is to an ocean.
@@garyr8739 bro wrote an essay
Lake huron and the surrounding region sits on a massive meteorite impact crater. Such an impact melts the earths' crust so metals tend to pool out. The region is rich in ore and produced a lot of iron for two world wars. The First Nations/Natives in the area of Wisconsin found little to no flint for tool making, but discovered natural copper deposits and learned to heat, hammer and anneal the copper to produce knives, fish hooks, arrowheads and spearheads.
I also meant to mention that the islands of Georgian Bay are home to the only poisonous snake in Ontario, the Massasauga Rattlesnake (not Mississauga)
Not just the islands.
There is no poisonous snakes in Canada. There is a species of venomous snake but there is no poisonous snake in the entirety of Canada.
Love your natural curiosity. Your channel is fun and informative. Thank you.
The source of the Mississippi River is Lake Itasca in Minnesota towards the western most point of Lake Superior but not a part of the Great Lakes.
I live on Lake Michigan, and I can attest, water levels are high. They were much higher last year, but definitely not low.
It hasn't been even 30 years since Lake Michigan was so low that some cities had to dredge their ports so that ships could use them.
The waives can be worse than ocean waives the ocean freighter refused to turn around and look for survivors of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald
Actually they did go back out to search
Sea Lamprey have rows of teeth very similar to shark teeth. And what they do is attach them selves with that sucker mouth to it's prey and just start chewing...which could you imagine if they did that to a swimmer.
Glaciers were two miles deep in many areas. They depressed the earth and it is still rising back up.
The Mississippi River had no conection to the Great Lakes until Chicago built a canal to connect the two and reversed the flow of the Chicago River.
Absolutely correct,.
Great video! To get a little perspective on size, Superior is twice the size of the country of Switzerland! Massive large tankers and other vessels sail these waters. If you get a chance watch the video of Gordon Lightfoot’s “ The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald “. There are also documentary videos about the sinking of this big tanker. Storms on these lakes are truly frightening.
The video could have mentioned the weather effects of the lakes, i.e. lake effect snow.
The Gales of November Remember. In 1918 there was a Three day Storm on ALL 5 Great Lakes. Over 25 ships Were lost with Over 250 people died. Back then there was NO Two way radiios/ walkie-talkies. Th help Captains.
it was actually an ore carrier not a tanker
@@ronblack7870 Yes I know it carried ore, I was pointing out to the person, how massive Superior and it Carrie’s all kinds of ships, like tankers..
The Mississippi River starts in Lake Itasca in Minnesota, and has no connection to the great lakes.
Erie is shallow and angry. She tosses and turns and NO ONE disregards her. But she keeps us safe and warm and warm and cool throughout the year till wet have to handle Weather belts or summer rains.
The video ignores many things, just off the top of my head.... the 30,000 islands in Georgian Bay (part of Lake Huron) and and that much of the heating & cooling for the buildings in Toronto's CBD utilizes lake water from Lake Ontario. Friends have a cottage on an island in Georgian Bay and swimming can be a challenge - the water can be quite pleasant but the a storm blows though and the next day the water has churned and to reference an episode of Seinfeld, men can expect serious "shrinkage".
I see that Geoff M recommends the NFB short film "Paddle to the Sea" which was originally a book about a First Nations boy who carves a model canoe with a boy in it and launches it to sail through the Great Lakes to reach the ocean. I'd suggest you give a listen to the song "The Wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot (in the vaguest of Aussie terms and my limited knowledge of Aussie folk singers the The Bushwhackers), it's based on a true event that occurred in the Great Lakes - fair warning you may be in tears at the end.
My front lawn. Near Meaford. th-cam.com/video/H3yeA8s1i4U/w-d-xo.html
There is Minamata disease in Grassy Narrows - water was polluted and people ate the fish.
I get my water from Lake Michigan. I’m about 35 miles north of Chicago on the western shore of Lake Michigan. Lake Michigan watershed historically doesn’t flow into the Mississippi or Ohio Rivers. The flow of the Chicago River now flows away from Lake Michigan rather than into it due to a series of locks.
I live near Lake Erie. It is shallow, and it runs southwest to northeast in length, so that regular winds cause staggering, nay, eye-popping, storms. There are irregular tidal swings called seiches that drown out low-lying urban areas in Toledo and Buffalo. Lake Erie water is polluted so that effectively there is no longer commercial fishing permitted. Lots of mercury from Detroit's automobile battery industry sits in the muck at the bottom of the lake. Mercury was once used to coat the lead battery plates of cars and trucks so as to render them more electrically conductive. Lake water levels tend to vary over the decades. The mussels do not cause water levels to vary, but do filter a staggering volume of water, and they thus concentrate a lot of nasty pollutants into their shells, which form truly impressive volumes of deposits. The lamprey eel approaches fishes and bathers, drills a hole into their sides, and sucks out vast amounts of blood. Thus, all rivers leading into and out of the lakes have river sections that are electrically charged to discourage lampreys from going upstream to lay eggs. A recent concern is that a recent migrant to North America are the Asian Carps, that grow fast, and leap up into the air--in large numbers--out of the water and smack motor boating sports fishermen in their torsos and heads, frequently with disabling violence . The Asian Carp are not yet in the lakes, and super electric water fences are being installed on the Chicago River to prevent their movement from the Mississippi River into the Great Lakes. On the Mississippi people shoot at leaping Carp with carbines, pistols, crossbows, and regular longbows. The Chicago used to drain Chicago's Cholera-ridden sewers into Lake Michigan, but 125 years ago had its flow reversed into the Chicago Canal, southward, into the Mississippi , so as to pollute the drinking waters of St. Louis.
I’m really enjoying your videos. And I never follow anyone, but I always look for yours. Thank you for the great content!
No worries, thanks for watching :)
Lake Michigan does flow into the Mississippi River, but that is an artificial outlet, and only one river--the Chicago River. The flow by this source is strictly curtailed by a lock in downtown Chicago. Since Chicago is the source of two watersheds, the Chicago River was switched from emptying into Lake Michigan and polluting the drinking water at Chicago, i.e. drinking water from Lake Michigan, sewage down the Chicago River to the Mississippi River and eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
I live in Holland Michigan and learned a few things. 1. That Lake Superior has half the water of all five together. 2, there there is enough water in the lakes to cover America up to 3 meters. Not sure I actually believe that, but ok. Last year the water level raised a few feet. Have not check this year.
Lake of the Woods area, westward off Lake Superior and forming part of the US-Canada border touching Wisconsin, Minnesota and Ontario covers a huge area but is broken up by a myriad of connected lakes, is pretty much another great lake.
Also the lake area just under lake Huron on your map is called lake St.Clair (Detroit, MI and Windsor, Ontario) boarder it.
I despair with an education system that allows someone to think that the Mississippi is connected to the Great Lakes. I rember learning about the Great Lakes in primary school in 1960. There was a fabulous book back then called Paddle To The Sea by Holling Clancy Holling that taught us all about the stories of the lakes and the people that lived there. Geography has been dumbed down in recent decades.
I read this fine book when I was a child. It was a wonderful way to teach children about the geography of the Great Lakes.
@@maryellis8902 I remembered the book so vividly from my childhood, I sought it out as an adult and bought a copy. I still have it. It is such a treasure from a wonderful husband and wife team The Holling Clancy is him, the last Holling is her. They were both illustrators and worked together on those beautiful watercolors and drawings so that no one can tell which bits were done by him, and which bits were done by her. Her name was Lucille Webster, and should be remembered, because while their many books were mostly from him, with the stories and concepts from him and then both of them creating the illustrations seamlessly, their close relationship was central to their lifetime of collaboration as artists as well as man and wife, entwined in what looks like the perfect union.
the water levels of the great lakes are not declining. the outflow is controlled by dams and the water level regularly flood beaches for entire seasons, keeping in mind that there really is no tide to speak of.
There are in fact a number of diversions of water from the Great Lakes by cities to provide water for industrial of municipal purposes. They are supposed to return the water to the lakes but often do not. The biggest one is the Chicago River diversion which allows Chicago to flush its waste water into the Mississippi River by reversing the flow of the Chicago River and using the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal and the Illinois River. Cities around the Great Lakes outside the Great Lakes watershed have gotten water from the lakes often against strong opposition from people who live on the lakes who don't want a drop in the level of the lakes which could imperil their water supply. They usually lose the battle against new water diversions.
There's already talks of altering the treaty to preserve the great lakes. Canada usually has to cow down to the will of the US. There's always the pretense of cordiality, but if it wants something, it's going to apply pressure. And it has the power to apply a great deal of pressure. And we're small enough that it doesn't take much.
I was born in northern Michigan and unfortunately I was too young to remember it. We were an Air Force family and right before I was born my dad got orders to DC so I was 4 weeks old when my family left Michigan. My mom tells stories of my dad and his friends driving their trucks over the Great Lakes during winter. That’s how frozen they get
LOL @ the video commentator saying the Great Lakes border 8 states but totally ignoring what borders these lakes on the other side. That's so typical of the American mindset. Their concept of the world often doesn't extend beyond their borders. They have a vague idea that Canada exists but way in the distance near the North Pole. It explains why you constantly meet Americans who wonder where all the snow is in the middle of summer; shocked that Canada is right there. They think it's a 1000 mile journey to reach Canada.
Holy shit calm the fuck down we know you guys exist
Most of their maps show mainland America surrounded by ocean, with Alaska and Hawaii just off the coast of California.
Knew this was an American based video. Love how Lake Superior gets most of it's water from some unnamed source in the north. Whatever that unknown blob is to the north is never named nor do they wish to share the four of them that also are partly in that unknown blobs territory. Final insult is showing part of the Niagara Falls that belong to that anonymous blob and not showing the American owned falls. At least they admitted there was an unknown blob of land to the north. OOPS, sorry we do get named when it comes time to pay for cleanup. Glad they didn't mention where the St Lawrence empties in the Atlantic. Fox News would call for bombing us for stealing the water from those American lakes.
Of course we get named when it's time for paying the bill for clean up. After all, they wanted to frack for oil in the St. Lawrence, and I believe they still have a pending lawsuit going somewhere to get permission to do so. And only in the US can private citizens OWN the 'water rights', whereas here all waterways, (and I think it is 10 feet of shore as well) automatically belong to the government.
LOL, so true. Not a bit of research was done in the making of this vid, typical American "facts" they found on the internet.
@@helmutvogel901 Good thing there are actual treaties and rock solid agreements regarding the great lakes. American companies can cry all they want, the treaties are there.
Yeah I was gonna say you know its an American video when there's almost no mention of Canada or any info from the Canadian side of the lakes. I feel like Georgian Bay would have been something to talk about on this.
@@zzzubmno2755 thank god. Yankees need to keep their greedy hands off our land.
OJB, the Lower 48 3 meters deep, or the entire Western Hemisphere in .30 of a meter. The H.O.M.E.S. thing is a reference back to my generation, and maybe today as well, when we were given this mnemonic device to remember the names of the 5--homes.
A little free and interesting info here--at 2:57, notice the island above the "U" and the "P". That's one of our national parks, named Isle Royale, accessible only by float plane or ferry--one of 3 of our 63 in the same situation. In the original French, it would be "eel roy-AL", but it got Anglicized to "I'll Royal". The access points are either from the tip of the peninsula south of the "E", which is in the state of Michigan, or directly to the NW, which is a town in the state of Minnesota. At the southern tip of L. Michigan is Chicago.
The Mississippi R. is about a 3-hour drive to the west. However, canals were dug to connect them about 150 years ago.
In elementary school I learned she made Harry eat onions.
@@doug112244 , I'm curious as to which one of the 2 came first. I graduated from H.S. in '65.
@@jimgreen5788 I graduated in '79 do I learned it in the '60s. It may be a regional difference.
I am not sure, as I have seen your videos about Canadian geography, whether you actually understand that the St. Lawrence River links the Atlantic Ocean into what is now the St. Lawrence Seaway (started 1954, completed 1959). This series of locks enabled a deal of commerce over the years.
The St. Lawrence Seaway is why the Great Lakes are so important economically to both US and Canadians in those regions.
However, commerce has also entailed heartbreak, as another commenter has mentioned...
Here is a link to Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the of Edmund Fitzgerald"..
th-cam.com/video/9vST6hVRj2A/w-d-xo.html
The St. Lawrence River really only connects the ocean to Lake Ontario. You can't sail a boat/ship up Niagara Falls. Or at least you couldn't.
New York City really got the jump on things when they dug the Erie Canal in upstate New York. Now you can take a boat up the Hudson River, cut across the canal, and enter Lake Erie, giving you access to 4/5 of the lakes.
Just a couple years later, the Canadians built the Welland Canal, that connects Ontario to Erie. But Canada doesn't have a huge city at the end of the SLS to take advantage of this like New York can at the end of the Hudson River. New York instantly became a key city for worldwide shipping.
Also the Erie Canal opened up the "west" for westward expansion across the USA, as depicted at the beginning of the movie How The West Was Won. The Great Lakes could take you as far west as Chicago or Duluth, depending on which direction you wanted to go.
Since the USA had just bought the Louisiana territory from France it doubled the size of the country and gave us the Mississippi watershed (priceless). This was considered the "west" at the time.
Once the real "out west" opened up, the previous "west" became known as the Midwest.
Today, Americans and Canadians use the Great Lakes for all sorts of things. If nothing else, plenty of recreation.
@@protorhinocerator142 Thanks for educating me!
Great thanks I fed through the St. Lawrence Way which is the St. Lawrence river
(watching these in the wrong order) yeah, Mississippi is separate. you'd probably enjoy looking at a Great Lakes watershed map - it lets you see where the ridge lines that split the rainfall are. Chicago is one of the closest points to the Mississippi watershed.
Zebra muscles attach to ships and coastal structures causing enormous damage. They are sharp as hell and will shred shit up.
Also, Duluth Minnesota at the west end of Lake superior is a international sea port. Right in the middle of the continent.
Yeah, there are two things in this that I'll comment on:
1) the "lakes shrinking" due to global climate change... warm air holds more water so that results in water evaporating, it also means less rain (generally) so lakes and rivers shrink, melting ice causes sea levels to rise, but fresh water to shrink. (simplified explanation)
2) the pollutants... in the past we didn't always know the dangers of "thing x" and certainly didn't consider where it went. So older, more dangerous, and often more heavily used stuff got into the lakes, and other ecosystems... and there isn't really a way to get it out. Al least not any time soon.
Enjoying these reacts, and this video contained a few facts I don't recall ever hearing before.
Lake Superior was at a record high the year before last.
You may get some request to respond to " The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Canadian Folk Star Gordon Lightfoot , true story very well written and detailed song describes the weather and the conditions of Lake Superior hauntingly well...so well in fact the song stops most Canadians in their tracks and even some of the younger generation don't recognize it, but they know they've heard it in the background somewhere ( maybe a wedding or a funearal) yes it's that popular and critically acclaimed. It's old Gord's Opus!!!! Story telling at it's finest, actually you'd be hard pressed to find a bad Gordon Lightfoot song! So if your interested in relating better with us Canucks listening to this Canadian ICON might give you some insight to the Canadian soul!! Sundown is the wife's fav by him.
Canadian Railroad Trilogy tells of the Building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Great song.
The Great Lakes *don't* drain into to the Mississippi river. If you pull up a watershed map of North America, you'll see that the Great Lakes are part of a separate watershed.
I live on lake Erie (the shallowest of the 5 lakes) in the most southerly town of all of Canada
The Mississippi starts at Lake Itasca, Minnesota and flows to New Orleans, Louisiana on the Gulf of Mexico.
if your in Michigan there is a surface fresh water source with in 2 miles of you at all times. and lake superior is also known as the lake that never gives up its dead. look up the song the edman Fitzgerald lots of history here kinda cool .
The river they feed into is called "The Saint Lawrence Seaway". Nothing at all to do with the Mississippi River, I'm afraid. lol.
The Sea Lamprey, with that nasty looking mouth, attaches itself to fish, sucks them practically dry, then moves on to another one, leaving it's last host to perish from wounds that won't heal. (if you're Canadian, you learn this stuff. lol.)
One last fun fact, although I can't recall the exact numbers... if you put a drop of water at the 'beginning' of Lake Superior, on average it takes, (and here is where my recollection/accuracy suffers), Many decades, as in a century or two(or more??? to make its way through the 5 lake system... sorry I can't tell you the accurate number.🤔🤷🏼♂
Ok.. it was bugging me I couldn't remember the number/time, so a quick search gave me this...
"The average drop of water takes 173 years to pass through Lake Superior. The average drop of water takes 204 years to pass from Lake Superior to the ocean."
Wow, 1 3/4 centuries to make it out of Superior, then a "mere" 31 years to get through the rest of 'em.
👍🏼✌🏼🇨🇦
You need to listen to the song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" by Gordon Lightfoot. It tells a tale of a freighter on Lake Superior.
The muscles were harming the ecology quite a bit, but now they've reached an equilibrium and they're less of an issue. They're actually one of the main things contributing to filtering crap out of the water.
Hey! Canada Here!!!! Widen your view America.
Gordon Lightfoot's song lists all 5 Great Lakes.
20% of the world's freshwater is a lot considering that the USA & Canada comprise under 5% of the world's population.
Lake Michigan on on the east coast of Wisconsin and the Mississippi River is on the west coast of Wisconsin. No, Lake Michigan does not flow into the Mississippi river. It does however flow into the Chicago river. Interestingly the Fox river in WI flows north into the bay of Green Bay which connects to lake Michigan.
The Mississippi River starts at Lake Itasca west of Lake Superior. The Mississippi is NOT connected to the Great Lakes.
The narrator neglects to state that the United States are in GREAT part to blame for the pollution of the Great Lakes! Although Canada polluted the Great Lakes, it was nowhere near the extent of that of the United States. In the past the US had had a deaf ear to Canada's concerns about the lakes we share.
Yep. The Mississippi drainage basin (flows south) to the Gulf of Mexico is a completely different drainage basin from the Great Lakes/St-Lawrence drainage basin (flows east) which flows to the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the North Atlantic beyond it.
Well, it is not naturally connected, but a canal was built to connect the two allowing barge traffic to access both waterway systems nearing 200 years ago.
In the 90s we couldn’t swim at the South End of Lake Michigan because of E. coli and pollution. It’s been cleaned up a ton the last 10 years. The North is always cleaner and has always been nice. Muscles are really bad and the biggest problem
Lake Michigan is 400 miles long
Hello from Michigan.
Industrial Pollution along the Great Lakes peaked in the late 1960's early 1970's - at that time you could neither fish nor swim in Lake Eerie.
In 1969 the Cuyahoga River famously caught fire and burnt hot enough to destroy railway bridges.
Things have come a long way.
At one time, all of land in Canada that didn't drain into the Great Lakes belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company.
I think you are quite brilliant ........I have mere weeks to live.... Sincerely I WISH I COULD WATCH YOUR FUTURE UNFOLD I WISHYOU EVERY BLESSING!!!
Lake Superior was not really carves out by the glacers. It is in fact a deep valley that existed before the glacers. It's a failed rift.
Pretty sure not all of that water is US property. Just saying there is a country that shares those lakes.
Access to water in the shared basins is agreed to by treaty. You're correct. Canada's going to make a fortune in the next hundred years with all that water being exported.
Can confirm, I live near Lake Ontario. lol
They never said it was US property. They said that "they border 8 states"
When the United States decides to take water from the Great Lakes, Canadian opinion will be accepted if it agrees with US opinion. Otherwise, it will be ignored.
@@bunkerhill4854 So you are saying the US is a bully. That is not news to me.
I live right by Lake Michigan. If you have any questions just ask.
The Great Lakes flow out through the St. Lawrence River, which forms part of the border between the US and Canada and then into the Atlantic Ocean near Nova Scotia .None of them flow out through the Mississippi River
I believe that the muscles and lampreys being invasive species is the same as rabbits in Austrailia.
Lampreys suck the fluids out of fish.
20% of the surface fresh water not all fresh water most of the fresh water in world is underground