 I am Roberta Feliki Pineski and I am a board member of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters, plural, plural, plural, which I was reminded of when I joined the board. So, we work at the intersections of all of those things and one of my favorite stories came from a board member who was renowned in science and he said when I had a classroom full of science folks I said at the end of this course you will write me a poem about what you have learned. That's what the intersection means. They had to think very differently, use the other part of their brain and that's what the Wisconsin Academy for years and years has done. So, I would encourage you if you are again, this is the advertisement, if you are not a member of the Wisconsin Academy please consider being one and we do wonderful things. My next is, I am introducing our executive director who keeps us all going. Jane, it's yours. Thanks, Bert. So, I am Jane Elder and I am the executive director of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters and we are so excited to be here tonight with our members and friends in Sheboygan and so glad that Val is here with us tonight for our Academy talk, What's going on in the Great Lakes? As Bert mentioned, the Wisconsin Academy promotes the understanding of science and the appreciation of visual and literary arts in Wisconsin and the work that we do and the events that we host like tonight are all designed to bring people together at the intersection of the science and arts and letters to inspire discovery, illuminate creative work and foster civil dialogue on important issues. We don't do this work alone and I want to thank those who made this evening possible. Our Wisconsin Academy members and donors who support our work, our host, the Meade Public Library Academy board member, Roberta Felikipineski. And a special thank you to our partner, the Meade Public Library Foundation. I'm delighted that many of the foundation's board members are here and able to join us this evening and would you stand for a moment so we can acknowledge you. Tonight's talk marks this fall's first fall talk in our partnership with the library foundation and we appreciate their commitment to the library and to this community by helping to make this evening and others like it possible. Let's thank all of our sponsors please this evening. If you're interested in learning more about the Academy, our programs or ways to get involved please find me, Bethany or Amanda after the talk. And you're also invited to take home a complimentary copy of our quarterly magazine, Wisconsin People and Ideas which has been out at the registration table. Now this is my moment before I introduce our speaker to ask everyone to please take that moment to turn off your electronic devices. Thanks for doing so. Tonight I'm very happy to present Val Klump, professor and dean of research and senior director of the School of Freshwater Sciences at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. Val's research focuses on how nutrients and carbon are cycled in the lakes and this work has taken him from the deepest soundings in Lake Superior in Michigan aboard a research submersible to the largest and oldest lake in the world, Lake Baikal in Siberia. His recent research highlights the presence and dynamics of dead zones such as the one in Green Bay including the impact climate change has on their extent and duration. I've had the opportunity to work with Val as a participant in the Academy's Waters of Wisconsin Network and also in my capacity as a member of the International Joint Commission's Great Lakes Water Quality Board. Yes, he's a distinguished scientist but he's also a committed public servant. Helping public decision makers and concerned citizens better understand the complex and remarkable Great Lakes ecosystem as we strive to keep it healthy and resilient. I think we're in for a great evening so please help me welcome our speaker, Dr. Val Klump. Thank you, Jane, and thank you for coming out this evening. I have a presentation that hopefully lasts about 30-40 minutes and then I'll open it up to questions. So if you have questions, hang on to them maybe towards the end. If it's really pressing, raise your hand and we'll interrupt and I'll answer it right away. So the topic this evening is about the Great Lakes. Probably most of you know that the Great Lakes represent 20% of the world's surface freshwater. This is without question the greatest single freshwater resource on the face of this planet. We are extremely lucky and privileged to live here. Oh, I need to talk to you. Is that better? How's this one? That's better. Okay. That one's better. Sometimes those wireless ones are a little weak. Okay. If you, well, click on the trigger here. Okay. If you took the Great Lakes and spread them out across the entire 48 states, it would cover the entire 48 states to a depth of 9.5 feet. It gives you an idea how much water is in the Great Lakes. It would cover both North and South America to a depth of one foot. It supports a $4 billion a year recreational sports fishery. It supplies drinking water for some almost 40 million people in the basin. And it's, as a region, it will be the third largest economy in the world. The system really cannot be put a price on it. This is a priceless environment. We call them lakes, but that's really a misoamer. These are not lakes. These are inland seas. Some of the biggest ships ever been built have been sunk in the Great Lakes, as you know. And a fully developed sea, for example, in Lake Michigan. That is when the wind blows the hardest of the longest distance over the greatest fetches that will produce waves up to 25 feet. So think about that. It's bad enough to be out there in six feet. You can ask my friend John Kennedy there who is a sea-going fellow in the Great Lakes and some of you else with 25 is just really hard to believe. Despite their size, these are surprisingly fragile systems. And there are a number of reasons for that. One is, evolutionarily speaking, these are relatively young systems. They're about 10,000 years old. The food chains in the Great Lakes are relatively simple, which means that they have niches which are open to invasive species. And that's been one of the things that has been a big issue in the Great Lakes. And I'll talk more about that later. They're also connected to the rest of the world. We're two ports of call away from essentially the entire rest of the world through international shipping. And this has been one of the major vectors by which invasive species have gotten into the system. University of Michigan did a study a couple of years ago looking at various stressors. They looked at 34 stresses on the Great Lakes and they developed this map where red, and they overlaid those stresses. And red is areas of high stress. Blue is areas of low stress. And you can see... You can see that near shore environments, near shore areas are more highly stressed, and if you go downstream in the lakes you'll see higher stress, which makes some sense. You can see these lines in Lake Superior. You might guess what that might be. Those are the shipping lanes in the Great Lakes. So I'm not going to talk about all 34, but I'm going to highlight a few. Yeah, all right, good. We're going to want to be here that long. Of course, I guess many of you in this room probably remember this event. 1969, the Cuyhoga River in Cleveland, Ohio caught on fire. And it wasn't the first time the Cuyhoga River caught on fire, caught on fire several times. And it wasn't the only river in the Great Lakes that caught on fire for that matter, the River Rouge in Detroit also caught on fire. But this, of course, picture made to cover a time magazine. And this event was largely credited in part with the passage of the impetus for the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972. At that time, Lake Area was declared dead. The rivers were foul, you couldn't drink them, you couldn't fish them. And as a result of the passage of the Clean Water Act, we invested a tremendous amount in pollution abatement and sewage treatment in particular. Billions of dollars was invested. In Lake Area, the target was to reduce phosphorus loading to the system by about 60%. This is the passage of the Clean Water Act. In the mid-1980s, they basically hit the target load for phosphorus. And Lake Area recovered. Water quality improved dramatically. And this would cause what I call the Seuss effect. Now, many of you probably, if you had kids, if you had grandchildren, and I'm sure you've read this book, the Lorax, Dr. Seuss, and there's a line in this that says, talking about water pollution, they'll walk on their fins and go woefully weary in search of some water that isn't so shimmery. I hear things that are just as bad up in Lake Erie. Well, the people in Lake Erie say, hey, Dr. Seuss, you know, Lake Erie has gotten better, you know, you should remove this. They wrote him a letter saying, hey, take that line out. And so, in fact, he did. If you go to the library, I'm sure if you go to this library, you go check out the Lorax, you will no longer find. I hear things that are just as bad up in Lake Erie. But of course, things have changed. And Lake Erie is shimmery again. This is a satellite photograph of an algal bloom in Lake Erie in 2011, and this has recurred since then as well. Any time you can see an algal bloom from outer space, you probably know you have a problem. This is a result of deutrary runoff from the land, primarily. And it consists largely of a single organism called microcysis, a cyanobacteria, or what they call blue-green algae. It's not really an algae, it's a bacteria. And this particular species, microcystis, produces an algal toxin, microcystin, which is one of the most toxic substances known. And the World Health Organization limit for drinking water is about one part per billion. During this particular algal bloom, concentrations in Lake Erie were measured up to 1200. The standard is one. Contact for swimming is 20. And of course, you probably also remember, and you can see a boat here going through this algal bloom, I'm told that it actually slowed the engines down. It was so thick. You also probably remember three years ago in August, the Toledo water intake was shut down because of high concentrations of that algal toxin in their drinking water system. Folks were told, you cannot drink it. Don't wash your hands with it. Don't give it to your pets. You can't boil it. The hospital couldn't use it to sterilize their instruments. The zoo had to get alternative sources of drinking water for the animals. Of course, bottled water disappeared off the shelves just like that. It was truly a Cuyahoga moment. It shut down the water intake to some 400,000 or 500,000 people overnight, essentially. And that's one of the problems we face throughout the Great Lakes is nutrient runoff. That's true here in Wisconsin as well. If you look at Green Bay, you get these large algal blooms. And one of the consequences of those algal blooms is when that material dies, sinks to the bottom, and begins to decay, well, that decay process consumes oxygen. And that's the formation of low dissolved oxygen in the bottom water in the production of what they call dead zones. You've probably heard about the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, the dead zone in Lake Erie. There's a dead zone in Green Bay. There are probably some 400 or 500 dead zones around the world. They're all about pretty much the same issue as driving them, and that is excess nutrient runoff from the landscape. The lakes are simply a reflection of what we do on the land. However, as a result of the work has been done, and I have to give a shout out to John Kennedy here, who is an old friend of mine, who is one of the initial fathers, I guess, of the monitoring program in Green Bay by the Green Bay Metropolitan Suisse District. We've been tracking oxygen in the bottom water since, what, 1986, right, John? A remarkable set of data. And primarily because of that data and the research that that data has triggered, there's a much greater awareness now of this problem in Green Bay. And I'm glad to say that the community in this area is like understanding now this was an issue, and I think everybody has taken it to heart and understand that we need to do something about that. So I'm very encouraged by that activity. It's not going to be easy. The target we think in order to improve water quality to an acceptable level is to reduction in nutrient inputs on the order of 40 to 50%. That's not going to be easy. That's going to be difficult, and it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take years, if not decades. But I think people now understand the nature of the problem and they're beginning to look at solutions to solve that. There are other sort of more nonconventional pollution threats. Of course, and I'll mention a couple here. The first is spills. I'm sure maybe you've seen this. There was a set of articles by Dan Egan recently in the Milwaukee Journal talking about the transportation of petroleum products throughout the Great Lakes, primarily in pipelines and there are a whole bunch of pipelines that crisscross the Great Lakes, but one in particular interest is the pipelines that crosses the Straits of Mackinac. There are two pipelines here called Line 5. They transport about 20 million gallons of crude oil, natural gas every day. They're over 60 years old. The company that operates them, Enbridge, wanted to increase the flow through those pipes. The only way you can increase the flow through a fixed diameter is to increase the pressure in that pipe. And if you had a 60-year-old pipe, people became concerned. There's an animation of what would happen if there were a spill in a lake. The different colors represent oil, which would be released at different depths into the lake. The Straits of Mackinac is without question the most dynamic region in the entire Great Lakes because the water flows in both directions back and forth. The winds really push it. And the currents through here can be pretty dramatic. So you can see a clock running down here. This is six or seven days now, and you can see how far the oil has actually spread during that time period. Of course, we've dealt with oil spills before. You're familiar with the New Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. But of course, many of the dispersants they used in the Gulf of Mexico you could not use in the Great Lakes because we drink this water. This is also much colder environment and the nature of this petroleum is different as well. It's much heavier crude. My feeling is there would be no recovery from something like this. This is just another map produced by Des Schwab which shows the sort of probability where the oil might go after a spill in the straits. So it'd be very widespread. So what's the risk? Well, also several years ago, seven years ago now, there was a pipeline break on the Kalamazoo River, same company actually that operates the straits of Mackinac, also operates this particular pipeline. It broke and spilled about a million gallons of tar sand to oil. I think that happened on a Saturday, Sunday night. I got a call from Juan Cuyard, who was the operator at the time of the Milwaukee water intake. He said, Val, do I have to worry about this? Because obviously the Kalamazoo River runs into Lake Michigan and we draw our drinking water. Lake Michigan said, well, I don't think so because the EPA thinks they got contained. It's not going to actually get all the way to Lake Michigan and in fact didn't. They're still working on that cleanup. They spent about a billion dollars to clean it up. And so although the probability of a break may be low, the risk actually to the system, I think, is astronomical and I think unacceptable, frankly. What about other things that we sort of on the lookout for? I'm sure you've also heard about this, a whole class of contaminants and those emerging contaminants, things like pharmaceuticals, personal care products, plasticizers, nanomaterials, flame retardants, a whole group of things. One of our scientists, Rebecca Clapper, is one of the leading scientists in this area and is studying, in particular, pharmaceuticals in the lake. Here's a list of just a handful of the things that they have measured now. Caffeine, we obviously know acetaminophen, some of these naproxen, I use that. A lot of these antimicrobial things they use for soaps, for example, some antibiotics. This is, here is the calculation of the discharge from the South Shore sewage treatment plant in Milwaukee. It's just one of the two treatment plants in Milwaukee. Their estimate, one of the most common drugs they find is metformin, which is a type 2 diabetes drug, very heavily prescribed. And their estimate is, this would be about 12,000 pounds of metformin are discharged to Lake Michigan every year. Now that's a heck of a lot of pills, when you think about it. They, she had a student, Dan Blair, who gave his, presented his dissertation and included in that were some of the data and he was showing his data on metformin out in Lake Michigan. And so finally I raised my hand and said, Ben, I said, what's the lowest concentration you measured? Thinking that he would say, well, you know, when we got five miles offshore, we couldn't detect anything. But in fact you didn't say, so the lowest we ever found was about 10 parts per billion at the furthest offshore station. In other words, they could find, no place that they looked in the lake did they not find this drug, which means two things. One, there's a fly coming in and it appears to be building up and it doesn't, it doesn't go away. This drug does not decompose. And that's true of many of these pharmaceuticals. The same thing that makes them effective as medicines means they're not metabolized in the body. Also means they translate through conventional sewage treatment plants largely unchanged. And so they, now it's a testament to our analytical ability that we can actually measure these things because they're very trace concentrations. On the other hand, the entire medicine chest is out there. And there is evidence that they are affecting microorganisms. I have another colleague, my Jim Wapels is looking at another pharmaceutical what happens to be radioactive. It's Idyne-131. It's used in various treatments and diagnostic procedures. What's interesting about this pharmaceutical since it's radioactive, it has a half-life which is only eight days, which means every eight days, half of it goes away. So obviously if you turned off the tap in a very short period of time, you wouldn't see anything because it all decay away. But the fact you can go out and near shore Lake Michigan and almost continuously measure the presence of this radioactive pharmaceutical means that it's constantly being supplied to the system. In fact, as you can use that number to calculate the flux into the system. Another thing of interest, I should mention too, for example with respect to the metformin, there's evidence that this has, even at low levels, levels that we can measure in the environment has estrogenic or endocrine disruptor impacts. You can find male fish that actually produce eggs in their gonads. And that's the first time that that had ever been detected or known for this particular drug. She got some pushback actually from the pharmaceutical industry on that. They didn't want to believe it, but it's true. Another area concerned is microplastics. A lot of the things we use, some of the soaps, some of things like suntan lotions, et cetera, have these very small particles in it. And so there's evidence that microplastics are showing up in the Great Lakes as well as the oceans. I put this number up here at 2050 to remind me to say that there was an estimate that by 2050 at the current rate that the biomass of plastics in the ocean will equal the biomass of fish in the ocean. Now, that's really hard to believe. Even if it's 10%, it's still an amazing number. And the reason for that is that it doesn't go away. In fact, just later this semester we have a world-renowned scientist from Hawaii who's been studying this. There's some presentation on that. One of the things that, if you look at sort of the toxological effects of these compounds in the old days, you used to take an organism, you put in a beaker, you'd squirt something in it until half of them died. It was known as an LC-50. And nobody really understood the mechanism of what impacted the organism. But today, because of DNA sequencing technology, we finally have the smoking gun, if you will, to understand how these compounds are interacting in the environment. Some of the work that Rebecca has done, for example, is looking at the impact of Prozac, which I'm sure you're familiar with, on fish. She's dosed a small fish, fat admirals. They have a very elaborate breeding behavior. The female will lay her eggs underneath a rock, the male will fertilize those eggs, and then he will guard that nest until they hatch out. At very low concentrations of Prozac, concentrations that we can measure in the environment, the male sort of, the female doesn't seem to care. She just broadcasts her eggs in the bottom of the tank. The male goes, I don't care. He doesn't bother, and basically, reproduction fails. Actually, if you read the warning label, for humans, the same problem, if you take Prozac. But what's interesting is now, she can take those fish, a fish that has not been exposed, and a fish that has been exposed, and run their genome, their gene sequence, and look at which genes are what they call up-regulated or down-regulated. Either turned on or turned off. And compare that with an organism that has not been exposed. And begin to understand the biological mechanism, which is really causing this change in behavior. So it's really going to be the rosetta stone for understanding how these things impact the environment. Eventually, we'll be able to go out in the environment, grab a fish, bring it back, laboratory-seeking their genome, and it'll tell us how it's being stressed. Now, we're a long way from there, but this technology has amazing potential for trying to understand what's going on in the environment in a number of ways. If you were to ask me what's the sort of biggest impact on the ecosystem today, I think without question it's been the invasion of non-native species. I'm sure some of you are very familiar with the sea lamprey, which essentially decimated or wiped out the lake trout population in Lake Michigan. The ale life, which came into the St. Lawrence Seaway, Spiney, Waterflea, Ron Gobi, and of course these dry-scented mussels. This video was taken actually quite a few years ago in Lake Michigan by a good friend of mine, John Jansen. These are all zebra mussels, it turns out, at this point. I'll point out about that. One is how clear the water is. It looks like the Bahamas, right? The other is those rocks, as you can see, are totally covered. These were not covered with zebra mussels before. This is an indication of a niche that was totally open in the Great Lakes. An invasive species came in and just took over. Well, as it turns out, that was in the early 1990s. In the early 2000s, another dry-scented mussel, a quagga mussel, which at arms length looks just like a zebra mussel, but it has some differences. One, it can live on soft bottoms and soft substrates, whereas zebra mussels need something hard to attach to. And it can live in colder and deeper water. And as a result, quagga mussels have spread starting in the early 2000 basically throughout Lake Michigan. In fact, as you can almost walk across the carpet of quagga mussels now in Lake Michigan, you are hard-pressed to find a zebra mussel. Quagga mussels have essentially taken over the system, and they did it very fast in about four years. One of the consequences was that one of the bases of the food chain in the system, a little crustacean, a shrimp-like fella called Diperia, which was a bottom-down here that basically disappeared from the lake. So the fish that fed on it, like the bloater chub, smoked fish you're all familiar with. Okay. All right. Okay. You don't ever want to cross the librarian, that's for sure. Okay. As a result, basically, there was nothing for fish to eat and largely collapsed in Lake Michigan. Now, there's been some indications that salmon are doing better again in Lake Michigan, but yellow perch, whitefish, other native fish have been essentially eliminated from the system. This is a trawl, a bottom trawl, taken by a friend of mine, Harvey Bootsma. This was taken several years ago, but things haven't changed. And they're trawling for fish, and what they got was a big bag full of mussels. They did catch one fish. There's a round gobie, which is also a non-native species. And I have a video. We'll see if it'll play. And this is, they put a camera on the bottom trawl, and that's what it looks like. And this is what it looks like, and it keeps looking like this for a long time, as long as they trawl this net. So basically, quagga mussels have taken over the Lake Michigan ecosystem. It's now estimated that there are four times more biomass in quagga mussels than there are in forage fish in the lake. Lake Superior, which is one of the most pristine lakes in the world, is now the third clearest lake in the Great Lakes. Both Lake here on the offshore waters of Lake Michigan and Lake here on the both clearer than Lake Superior. It's because of these mussels. They're voracious filter feeders. In particular, it's the food particles out of the water column. It was estimated when they invaded Lake here that they filtered an amount of water coolant to the entire volume of the lake every six days. Now Lake here is a big lake. It's caused that water clarity means there's nothing in it, which means there's no food. It means that there was about over an 80% decline in the phytoplankton as the algae that live in the water, in the pelagic primary production that feeds the fish in this system. So Lake in Michigan and Lake here have been totally re-engineered from a system which had a pelagic food river, a water column-based food web, to one is now totally based on the sediment organisms that live on the bottom. Well, there's also some other impacts as a result of these mussels. One of the things is they immediately, of course, as I said, they immediately cleared the water in the near shore. Prior to zebra mussels, and quagga mussels, this is what it looked like in the near shore. The near shore of Lake Michigan is fairly turbid and so light only penetrated a little distance. But then after these dry sanded mussels moved in shore, they cleared the water and so now light could penetrate much deeper. Because they were filter feeders, and supplied to the bottom, and they also provided something attached to it. This resulted in the blossoming of massive beds of clodophora, which is an attached algae which lives in the near shore. In fact, clodophora was the poster child for phosphorus removal back in the 70s and 80s. So now, if you go out in Lake Michigan and look at the bottom in the near shore, this is what it looks like. These are vast meadows of clodophora. Now, there are mussels there, you can't see them. They're underneath the clodophora, but they're there and they're alive. One of the sort of of course, when this material dies, senesce breaks off and wave energy will wash up on the beach. It begins to decay. Smells like, you know, all get out. Everybody in Milwaukee, of course, blamed the lake. Must be their fault. Smells like sewage. Gotta be sewage, not sewage. In fact, this problem was occurring throughout the Great Lakes in some of the most pristine areas. Door County, Sleeping Bear, National Seashore. One of the consequences of this, too, is that when this stuff begins to decompose, it goes anaerobic. There's no oxygen in it. It turns out it becomes the perfect media for the organism which causes avian botulism. And so there's many huge resurgence in avian botulism in the Great Lakes. There's when these waterfowl feed in these and pick out the little bugs and crustaceans that are in this and they take up that toxin. And so that's become a major problem. And one of our scientists, Harvey Boothma, is actually working in Sleeping Bear's Andean National Seashore studying the mechanisms behind this issue. As I said, most of these invasive species have come in in ballast water. It was a study done almost 10 years ago now. Maybe more than 10 years ago. By a couple of economists at Grand Valley State, funded by the Joyce Foundation, it looked at the value of the international shipping in the Great Lakes. Now, maritime shipping in the Great Lakes is a multi-billion-dollar year industry. I mean, it's extremely valuable. But the vast majority of that is interlake, intra-lake transfer. It's like iron ore from Duluth to Gary, it's salt from Detroit or Cleveland to Milwaukee or coal from Ashtabula to where it needs to go. They estimated that the international shipping, that is, it requires it comes out of the ocean through the St. Lawrence Seaway, it was about $55 million a year. That was a value that caught the attention of a lot of people. Because invasive species have been a billion-dollar, multi-billion-dollar impact on the system. $55 million they said, wow, that's not much at all. And so there is a big move, a foot to try to physically separate the Great Lakes and say, hey, wait a minute, maybe we should close the Seaway down. There are other ways to transport goods in and out. The St. Lawrence Seaway is too small now to carry these big container ships anyway. So that's an ongoing debate. What about climate change? This was a chart taken out from NASA of the New York Times. Hotest year on record 2015. I put this slide together to go last year. Last year 2016 was not the highest record. 2017 was also a very hot year. At midway through the year, it was going to be, 17 was racked up to be the second hottest year on record. I've been giving presentations about this issue for probably almost 20 years. I've said the same thing every year. The 10 hottest years have all been in the last 15 years. I've said that every year for 20 years. What's the impact? In Wisconsin, pretty dramatic. These are projections from the Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts. Particularly the group in the Center for Climatic Research at UW-Madison. Good friends of mine, Dave Lorenz, Dan Weimann and others. One of the projections for the end of the century is 4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit hotter. But nearly two weeks. This is for Madison now over 100 degrees. I've lived in Milwaukee for 37 years now and I can only remember a single day in Milwaukee where it was over 100. To think that we would get two weeks over 100 and nearly two months overnight. These are daytime high temperatures. It's also projected to be wetter. A 10 to 20 percent increase in precipitation. That precipitation comes in more intense and more frequent events. This is a run. This is an animation that's okay, it's not going to run. This is comparing 2012. This is for very blurry looks like August. These are the same date, 1992, which is a pretty normal year. Climatically at least in the old days. In 2012, which is time was one of the hottest years on the record, has been superseded by several years since then. You can see how much warmer temperature. It goes up. Purple is warm. Blue is cold. You can see how much warmer Lake Superior is and how much warmer Lake Michigan is in the summertime. We've started to see now Lake Michigan temperatures in the middle of the lake hitting 80 degrees. More than once. That's pretty unusual for Lake Michigan. That's very unusual. One of the consequences of that is that ice cover on the lakes is decreasing. This has to be data for Green Bay. One of the other consequences that's particularly in Lake Superior is that water temperatures are rising twice as fast as air temperatures. The reason for that is because ice axes are very good solar insulators. During when the lake is covered with ice, sunlight sort of bounces off and it does not heat the lake. The lake only starts to heat up really until the ice cover goes off. As that open water period gets longer and longer, the period during which the lake can absorb solar radiation gets longer and longer and so the temperature goes up faster and faster. Eventually you will reach a point at which you don't have any ice cover in that process. Reaches a new steady state. The consequence is that over the last 30 years water temperatures are rising faster than air temperatures. What about lake levels? Because climate is the primary controller of lake levels. Two things basically control lake levels. The amount of precipitation, I get rain and snowfall, the amount of evaporation that occurs. There are diversions in and out of the lakes and in fact there are more diversions into the lakes than out of the lakes. But their impact on the lakes is very small relative to the two major things. How much rainfall we get and how much evaporation occurs. As our climate gets wetter, we get more rainfall lakes go up. As the temperature gets warmer and particularly this time of year when you start to get cool air over warm water you see that steam coming off the lakes or fog. There's a lot of water going into the atmosphere as the lakes get warmer, evaporation increases. One of our scientists, Paul Rober looked at the hydrologic budget for Lake Michigan and here in which hydrologically are one lake. He looked at the terms in a water balance and pulled out the input term from the evaporation term and looked just at the evaporation. What he showed was that evaporation over the last 30 years or so has increased by about 25%. If rainfall had not increased if you just think of the water level in term alone it would have decreased lake levels by maybe as 8 or 10 feet. That's an enormous drop in lake levels. Because water level, because it's also been wetter much of that evaporative loss has been offset by increasing lake levels by increasing precipitation. This is a history of the Lake Michigan here on going back to the late 1990s starting here in about 1999 or so. This is the average rate. You can see lake levels uses annual cycle. It's usually lowest in February and peaks in mid-summer. You can see it go up and down every year. This was the longest period on record about 15 years which we had below average lake levels. This was also a very warm period. Now we all know that actually we hit an all-time low in 2013. This was a new record low in Lake Michigan. Everybody was worried about low lake levels. Then we had some very cold winters. Remember the polar vortex and the lake levels bounced back faster probably than they've ever bounced back. Today we're above the long-term average by 6 or 7 inches or so. This could easily go back down again. The all-time high was in 86-87 which is right over here someplace. We're nowhere near that. Normally the lakes fluctuate on the order of about 6 feet. One of the projections Paul has in terms of climate change because we're getting both more intense and we're getting higher precipitation and more evaporation. One of the things that the modelers are predicting is that in general lake level will probably drop somewhat. We'll get higher highs and lower lows. So we sort of have the worst of both worlds. We have to plan, if you're a coastal community like Sheboygan, you need to plan for higher highs, record highs and also record lows. That's a challenge for flooding and shoreline erosion. A lot of issues involved in that. These are some of the long-term projections going out toward the end of the century. You can see these projections are kind of all over the map. In general, most of them call for lower lake levels and you can see by not just a little amount. I mean, a one-foot change in lake levels is dramatic in this system. All right. I've got to finish up here. The other thing about lake is precipitation is it's predicted to come in fewer but more intense rain events. That's one of the driving forces of which washes off our land because it's probably 80% of which comes off the landscape comes in like 10 events. Ten times a year it rains hard and as those events increase potential for erosion and runoff increases as well. So, the major challenge is closing 15 minutes. Okay. He's right on time. So the major challenge of the 21st century is to reconcile the inherent conflict between human activity and environmental sustainability and frankly, nowhere I think is that challenge greater than when it comes to freshwater and freshwater resources. It's a major challenge and an opportunity for us. Oh, and one other big problem. This is a few years ago in Milwaukee they raised water rates and there were people who were outraged my rates went up by 20%, 30% in some cases and they were writing letters to the editor and complaining about this and finally I got upset and I said, well, time out. This is not a water bill. This is not a water rate because the water is coming to you absolutely free. You don't pay a thin dime for it. What you pay for is the withdrawal, the distribution, the treatment and putting it back in the lake. That's not really a thin dime for. Now the cost or the value of the water at the end of the pipe that you and I use or the farmer or the brewery or whoever it might be is that we could probably put a value to. It might be difficult but we could estimate I think fairly accurately what the economic value to us as individuals and businesses and communities what that value is. The value of the water at the other end of the pipe in Lake Michigan. The value to the system. Now that would be a lot harder to calculate to estimate but I can guarantee you one thing. It is not zero. The problem is we're not paying it. We're not paying. We're having the lake as subsidizing our activities and that cannot go on in my view. So of course I wrote a couple op-ed pieces about this. This happens to be my particular soapbox issue. If you ask people what should we do to improve water quality to make the lakes fishable and swenable? 97% of the people will say do whatever it takes. I say you were serious. Do whatever it takes. So I said okay here's one solution. I suggested we put a surcharge on water use. Two cents per 100 gallons. Now the average household use is about 100 gallons a day. So it's two cents a day. Most people can't tell you what their water bill is because it's so low. They don't pay that much attention to it. This would add about a dollar amongst the average household $12 a year. We pay more for that than we do with a cup of coffee during the week or certainly cell phone service or any other things we use. In Milwaukee that would generate between four and five million dollars a year. That's not a lot of money. But over time if we invest that in understanding what we're doing in the environment it can have an impact. That's about $12 a year. We'll go a long way towards understanding what we're doing because frankly the Great Lakes are a managed ecosystem. Whether we like it or not, whether we do it deliberately or inadvertently, we manage the system and you cannot manage something unless you understand how it works. That's truly important. We are not investing enough in understanding that lake. One of the things of course I'm a big proponent of is the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. I propose this particular program was taken out of the federal budget initially but has been put in back by Congress. It was originally proposed at around $400 million a year. A $2 billion program. It's currently funded at about $300 million a year. That's simply a down payment. Not even a down payment that's needed in this system. We need to take this program from an initiative to a program. I also think that we should establish a target date by which we say we are going to restore the Great Lakes by you name the date. We can argue what that date should be but we should say no, we are going to restore the lakes by 2040. That is two things in my mind. One, it gives us some urgency that we have to do it. That's on us. It also indicates the level of investment needed because it's not trivial but we are definitely capable of doing it. There's no question in my mind we have the economic potential and the benefit economically to the region is immense. Economists have estimated for a $20 billion investment in Great Lakes Restoration we return conservatively return $50 to $80 billion return of value to the system so it makes economic sense. We are at the School of Freshwater Sciences with the Great Lakes Water Institute and the Center for Early Studies that we celebrated our 50th year last year. However, the school is relatively new it was formed in 2009. We transitioned solely from a research institute to a graduate program in Freshwater Science we're the only one in the country we currently have about 65 graduate students in the program and we're very proud of that. We have a new building, a $53 million addition to our facility and we're very proud of that as well. Our number one priority in the school and the science we conduct is to understand the ecosystem. As I said, you can't manage something and take care of it unless you understand how it works. They also have a Center for Water Policy because policy is what drives everything that we do. We have the will of people to understand the programs and the mechanisms by which we will correct the ills and protect the lakes. Someone said, the future has no constituency. Which is true, I mean, my great great grandchild he said, wow, why didn't you take care of this? Why did you put this off on us? So it really is our responsibility to understand what's going on to protect these lakes for future generations because they're going to be around 100 years from now 200 years from now, 500 years from now. One of the things, here's a crass plug. We have a research vessel, the RV Niskay which the Native American word means clean pure water. Niskay is a great boat but she's 63 years old and has pretty much reached the end of her lifetime and so we're in the process of raising funds for a new state-of-the-art research vessel for the Great Lakes. We want to raise $20 million. If anybody's got an extra 10 million bucks don't leave the room without talking to me. Okay, final thought. The Great Lakes are essentially closed systems. A lot of residents time for Lake Michigan is about 100 years so that means for all intents and purposes anything you throw, toss, leak or otherwise get into the system. I always tell people, if you put it in today there's a good chance you will drink it tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, some time then they're not too distant future. So you also know the water makes up a significant portion of your body. 70% of your bling, 80% of your blood. So if you're like me and you've lived in this area and you drink Milwaukee tap water or Sheboygan tap water you are more, think about that, you are more Lake Michigan than you are anything else. So what's it going to be? And those are two untouched photographs of the Great Lakes. So thank you. And one favor if I'm not a Facebook person but if you are a Facebook, please go on our Facebook page and like us you'll make me a hero back at the lab with my younger colleagues who, you know, Val always mention our Facebook page. Would you please you know that? So there you go. So I'd be happy to take any questions. We have I don't know maybe 10 minutes. Jane, I don't know. Yes, in the back. Hi. Is this on? Okay. I can't talk from here. So I have a comment slash I don't know. I'm going to say it anyway. So you had a slide that had said science to policy to law and I think that's really interesting but I think we also need to look at how the science also maybe inspires change in business. Whether it's from Polar Company which is the place where I work to even smaller businesses within our community I think there's a lot of opportunity there so rather than forcing companies to change because of the law how can we inspire them by this information and the economic opportunity that they have to make these changes. So we all use water whether it's directly like if you're making beer or processing food or whether you're in a manufacturing process I mean and there's a huge incentive for companies to conserve water. For example Miller Brewing. In order to make a can of beer they have to heat water, cool water reheat it, recool it and then they finally put it in a can. Heating and cooling that water takes a lot of energy so the less water they use the less heating and cooling they do the more money they save. The motor company for example has changed the way they paint their vehicles. They used to use a lacquer based solvent based paint, they now use a water based paint they recycle the water, they have now plants their newer plants have zero water use and it saves them money. So we all have I think the technology for conserving water even in an area like Wisconsin where you say wow we live 100% of the world's fresh water, what are we worried about? Well, talk to people in Waukesha or Madison or wherever else. I mean there are places not too far away where water conservation is a big issue. So that's a very good point. Yes, ma'am. So there's a lot, the question is what's the, for restoration what kinds of activities are being done? A lot of things restoration of coastal wetlands for example cleaning up formerly contaminated harvests like here in Sheboygan or in Green Bay for example there are some 43 areas of concern around the Great Lakes that were contaminated to the extent that they adversely impacted human or wildlife health we've managed to clean up a couple of those so there's a major cleanup and we have the ability I mean we're going to spend when the dust clears in Green Bay I think the last number I saw we're going to spend $1.2 billion to clean PCBs out of the Fox River I mean a more normal ecosystem at that excellent point. What is a more normal ecosystem? I think any ecologist who tells you what Lake Michigan or the Great Lakes are going to look like 15 years from now forget it. We don't know. I mean the system is not at steady state. Look at the impact of these dry-scented muscles that have had on the system and the sort of ripple effects that they've had on the system. Very difficult to tell. I mean my feeling is we've been sort of on the back of the train looking out the back and sort of seeing what has happened and what we really need to do is get out in front and understand how the ecosystem works because once you have the data to understand how the system works you can put together a model of how it's going to react in the future and that's the only way that we're going to sort of get out in front of these issues if we have a well calibrated well informed model no models are perfect obviously but once we have those models we can sort of come in a projection of what the future will look like and make some corrections in that at least you know be conservative. Yes. I've been working within the Great Lakes for as an engineer I had to go for over 40 years and now the two-minute warning. One of the biggest challenges I have is the departure from the norm when you display you know changes in Great Lakes water surface elevations over the last 15 or 20 years then you look at say for the past 50 years and looking forward we know that the departures are accelerating that these departures are getting bigger and bigger both positive and negative so I'm a big modeler I have always been a big modeler but I really have, I'm challenged having to look forward recognizing that we have a very small record of these departures that's one issue the second I guess is that maybe in terms of restoration we need to provide a lot more attention at the residential level the flush or the numbers of flushes that we have in our homes because a lot of the man-made pollutants that end up in the lake plastics beads, pharmaceuticals that's where they're coming from so if we're going to make changes there are community and cultural changes that we can make that are really easy we just have to present a mechanism that will change minds. That's a very good point thank you for that. One of the projects we have in Milwaukee is looking at some of these sort of emerging contaminants, pharmaceuticals in river water but we're also measuring some things that are, you know are benign, we're measuring things like cinnamon and vanilla other parts of the country they've shown that three days after Thanksgiving there will be a big spike in vanilla and cinnamon in the water people get that, they go oh I know where that's coming from we all have an impact on the system and so part of it is people becoming aware of it and I think once they are aware of it I'm going to ask you, I said no we got to do something about this this is unacceptable. So my question is the fishery before in the 1990s Lake Michigan was an unnatural fishery habitat it wasn't natural correct? When? I'm sorry. In the 1990s Lake Michigan itself was not unnatural fishery it was man-made so I agree that the data before that we have not really seen the data from like 1920 onward and that would be very interesting to see what that data looks like I guess too what I wanted to say was that in order to actually fulfill a restoration project you have to close off the St. Lawrence Seaway and only do intra water transportation and then you have to get rid of the invasive species is there a plan on how to get rid of the mussels? No. Do I say the mussels are here to stay? The system has changed for all time. So the only question is to stop the next invader could have some impact and we don't know I mean it looks as if the quagga mussels have expanded now to it sort of topped out it looks like the population has reached a peak anytime you have a monoculture of anything you are susceptible to a sudden crash and that could dramatically change so we don't really know there are very good fisheries records in the Great Lakes going back a long time the history of fisheries in the Great Lakes is the history of introduced species whether they got in inadvertently or whether they put in deliberately and when they opened the Seaway one of the first things that came in was the Yamper Eel and that basically wiped out Lake Trout for example in Lake Michigan in the late 50's the DNR said 6 million linear feet of gill net and they caught 6 fish basically wiped them out and we have spent millions of dollars restocking Lake Trout in the Great Lakes without any effect one of the other species that came in of course was the ale wife which back in the 50's and 60's some of you probably remember was susceptible to die off would pile up on the beaches it was horrible they'd use front end loaders to get rid of these stand fish and I got my name of Tanner who was the secretary of the DNR in Michigan hit upon the idea of stocking salmon in the Great Lakes Pacific salmon to feed on ale wives to reduce the ale wife population that was phenomenally successful the ale wife population went down is what you might expect the last salmon fishery in the Great Lakes many were catching huge fish people literally come from all over the world the fish lake Michigan and what you would expect happened is that the ale wife population went down but also then the salmon started to go down to to the point where believe it or not some fishing groups were advocating stocking ale wives but the DNRs of those states would get together every year and decide because the lakes at Kohol and Shunok they swim upstream and die when they reproduce we decide every year on how many fish to stock in this system well after the Clean Water Act and a water quality improved in our streams particularly in Michigan salmon started to naturally reproduce in some of those streams so there was natural reproduction it's now estimated in Lake Huron in Lake Michigan that much as 60 to 70% of the salmon in the lake naturally reproduced so the management tool has gone basically mother nature has taken over control the ale population has taken a huge nosedive and one interesting thing is lake trout have started to reproduce successfully again in the lakes and the theory is that because the ale wife population has dropped so much and that was the main forage base for lake trout they have switched to other species ale wife contain a very high concentration of an enzyme thymidase which apparently interferes with lake trout reproduction and when they shifted their diet off of alias and other species all of a sudden they were starting to reproduce and we're starting to see now natural reproduction of lake trout in the great lakes so A's and carp gets in the news a lot it's in for those of you who don't know it's in the Mississippi drainage the Illinois River the Chicago drainage canal the flow is reversed so that's a connection the local barrier put on the Chicago drainage canal where originally it was put in to keep round gobies from getting into the Mississippi drainage that door was originally decided to slam the other way keep gobies from getting out of the great lakes so they beefed that up in order to keep Asian carp out the problem is of course that the engineer has not yet been born it can design a system that never fails and with fish or with biology it only takes one grab it female and then you know you're off and running of course they're always described in the press as the voracious Asian carp that eats 40% of its body weight a day now with water clarity this high in Lake Michigan you would have to swim a long way to get 40% of your body weight because these are planktivorous fish they do not eat other fish mostly fishing ecologists that I know say that Asian carp have a very difficult time making a living in Lake Michigan that doesn't mean they couldn't make a living in other parts of the lake western end of Lake Erie which is a very utrophic system southern end of Green Bay they're used to living in they're riverine fish they need about 60 kilometers of flowing water in order to spawn and we just don't have rivers like that in the great lakes the Chicago drainage canal is not the only door the Wabash River in Indiana when it floods in the spring it will connect to the Mami River and there are Asian carp in that system so they could jump the divide there my daughter is an assistant U.S. attorney she was in the Cleveland office they had a case there they had a case there where people were taking Asian carp fishing out of the Mississippi drainage putting them in water tanks and taking them to the fish market in Toronto which has a very high Asian population they like live fish they don't want to buy a dead fish they want to live fish they put these fish on ice, take them across the border once they got across the border they fill a tank back with water they caught those guys so there's more than one way for this and my feeling is eventually they will if they haven't already and there's some evidence they will get into the system the question is how big a threat are they but if you want I mean the old being conservative is good because biology organisms are very adaptable although we say it was not a great system for them but it's not an easy cheap fix to close off the system