Interview with the author of The Dynamic Great Lakes

as published in the Michigan Environmental Report, vol 20, number 3

Interview of Barbara Spring by Dave Dempsey

What prompted you to write The Dynamic Great Lakes?
I was inspired by a speech I heard while at a writer’s conference in Aspen, Colorado. N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The House Made of Dawn, gave a speech on the importance of landscape. When I came home, it occurred to me that my landscape is a waterscape–the Great Lakes system. With this thought, I began to work on The Dynamic Great Lakes. The importance of the Great Lakes is not always appreciated. I wanted people to appreciate them.

Who is the intended audience for the book and who might enjoy reading it?
I wrote The Dynamic Great Lakes with a general audience in mind. I spent a lot of time searching for and up-to-date book about the Great Lakes and I could not find one. I believe my book is important because it shows the Great Lakes and their connecting waters in relation to each other; it shows the lakes in relation to their unique dunes and wetlands and to their biota. The Great Lakes are about 20% of all the fresh surface water on this planet. I wanted to make people aware of how precious this freshwater is and how vulnerable. I want people to feel concerned about how these lakes and their web of life is faring.

Do you think Michiganians generally are knowledgeable about the Great Lakes?
Someone who has lived by Lake Michigan all of his life read my book and said, “I have been taking these lakes for granted.” I believe that people in Michigan and the other Great Lakes states and provinces need to know more about the Great Lakes so they will be in a better position to make good decisions about them. The Great Lakes will become more and more important as our population grows and the people are asked to vote for candidates who will either understand the issues and care for the lakes with future generations in mind, or those who would exploit them for short term gains.

What are your earliest memories of the Lakes?
My earliest memory of the Great Lakes–I must have been about 7–was a trip with my family around Lake Superior’s rocky shore. I still remember how awed I felt when I first viewed the largest of the Great Lakes and felt its icy water. My father woke us all up one morning proudly displaying a string of brook trout he had caught from a tributary stream to Lake Superior. We had them for breakfast. Just delicious.

If you were czar(ina) of the Great Lakes, what is the single most important thing you would do for them?
I would develop energy sources that do not threaten the environment. I would phase out the 37 aging nuclear power plants in the Great Lakes watershed and find a way to store atomic wastes in a place where it has no chance of getting into water. That would be my decree. I would hire the best minds to work on this daunting problem and I would tell them to do it will all haste. 

Sink Holes in Lake Huron

The Middle Island sinkhole is open to Lake Huron, creating a gradient of biological activity. A nine-metre boat is also visible in this aerial photo for sense of scale. ((Scott Kendall/Bopi Biddanda/Grand Valley State University))Twenty metres below the surface of Lake Huron, scientists have discovered peculiar sinkholes where a bizarre ecosystem at odds with the rest of the lake flourishes.

The huge lake's freshwater fish shun the dense, salty, oxygen-deprived waters of these sinkholes off northeastern Michigan.
Instead, brilliant purple mats of cyanobacteria — cousins of microbes found at the bottom of permanently ice-covered lakes in Antarctica — and pallid, floating, ponytail-like microbes thrive.

Groundwater from beneath the lake is dissolving minerals from the ancient seabed and carrying them into the lake to form these exotic, extreme environments, says aquatic ecologist Bopaiah Biddanda of Michigan's Grand Valley State University, a leader of the team studying the sinkhole ecosystems.
"These are almost primordial Earth conditions, with high sulphur and low oxygen like in the ancient oceans that covered the Earth three billion years ago," Biddanda told CBC News.
"It gives us a window into the past and who knows what value it will hold."
The researchers describe this little-known underwater habitat in this week's issue of Eos, published by the American Geophysical Union.
Although above-ground sinkholes in the area were discovered decades ago, the submerged sinkholes were only recently uncovered.

Discovered 8 years ago

In 2001, researchers with the Connecticut-based Institute for Exploration stumbled across them during an underwater archeological survey for shipwrecks in Michigan's Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
Scientists began to explore these sinkholes a couple of years later, finding some just 20 metres below the surface and others extending 100 metres down, where the sun never shines.
But their findings have trickled in over the last few years because of the logistical problems in exploring lakebed sinkholes.
"Finding these little spots in a huge lake — you can't even compare it to looking for a needle in a haystack," said Biddanda.
The most recent findings show an ecosystem that has more in common with Antarctic lakes and deep-sea, hydrothermal vents than it does with a freshwater lake.
"We were amazed to find these brilliant cyanobacteria mats," said Biddanda. DNA sequencing of the purple mats show they are closely related to mats found in the ice-covered, oxygen-poor Antarctic lakes.
Biddanda suspects similar ecosystems once existed all around the Earth but largely disappeared as the planet's atmosphere became increasingly oxygen-rich.
The team, including researchers from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, suspects similar sinkholes exist under the other Great Lakes because, with the exception of Lake Superior, the lakebeds are all composed of limestone, with ancient aquifers running beneath.
The researchers will continue to study the sinkholes this summer, keeping a sharp eye out for the possible discovery of never-before-seen organisms and biochemical processes.