Researcher Finds Ancient Tools Deep Below the Waters of Lake Huron

Earlier this year an anthropologist found a pointy stick a hundred feet down at the bottom of Lake Huron, dating back to 8,900 years. University of Michigan anthropologist John O’Shea. He found a stick likely crafted by human hands. Perhaps a stick to pitch a tent or hang meat. Something. But a relic of humanity.

(photo from the Detroit Free Press)

The 5 1/2-foot long pole, tapered and pointed, is positively prehistoric — 8,900 years old based on carbon dating — and evidence of human activity along a land bridge that once linked northeast Lower Michigan to what today is central Ontario.

“The first thing you notice is that it appears to have been shaped with a rounded base and a pointed tip," said U-M anthropologist John O’Shea, who talks about the discovery and the search for ancient hunting sites in a video.

Before Socrates. Before the Odyssey. Before the Egyptian pyramids, people occupied the coast of Lake Huron. Ten thousand years ago, when Lake Huron and the upper Great Lakes were much smaller, prehistoric human beings lived along their coasts.

Underwater archaeology in the Great Lakes is a relatively new field, producing some exciting finds of human existence in North America. The most recent research is coming as a result of recent, detailed underwater mapping of the water bodies. The detail has helped scientists determine where the shallower coastline used to be, and then predict where human populations were likely to have been hanging out.

Two years ago University of Michigan researchers found evidence of ancient drive lines at the bottom of the lake; long rock structures that people would chase caribou toward, and as the caribou formed a single file line people at the end of the drive line would kill the week's meals.

Surveying an underwater ridge with side-scan sonar and remote-operated vehicles, John M. O’Shea of the university’s Museum of Anthropology and Guy R. Meadows of the Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory discovered stone features that resemble those used today in the Canadian Arctic to hunt caribou. The submerged features date from about 7,500 to 10,000 years ago, when the lake’s level was much lower and the ridge was a narrow causeway that ran from present-day Michigan to Ontario, dividing the lake in two.

It's easy to forget, sometimes, that we inhabit an ancient land, storied and rich with human history going back thousands of years.

High School Kids Discover Not One But Two, Century Old Ship Wrecks in Lake Huron

I'm a huge fan of discovery in our back yards. Looking in a familiar place and finding something new and exciting right under your nose. It's even more compelling to me that these types of discoveries are far more accessible than the discoveries in exotic, distant places. When I hear about a farmer plowing his field and he unearths evidence of an ancient people. That's exciting.

Or in this case...when some high school kids find not one, but TWO century old shipwrecks in Lake Huron near their own homes. That's pure good right there.

This quote from Tirrea Billings wells me up.

"I'm so used to, you know, being in the class room and being in one place and just being here. But when, like, I got to go out there and experience all this different technology and things that I never even heard of, it made me realize that there's so much that the world has to offer..."

The kids were selected from Arthur Hill High School Saginaw, Michigan, to be part of a documentary about ship wreck exploration. Saginaw, like many of the industrial parts of Michigan, has been hit hard over the past decade by the decline and flight of manufacturing...they've been languishing for a very long time.

It's exciting to see some attempts made to show kids in that region that there's still a big, unexplored world of possibility waiting out there for them. And it's right next door.

Youngest Man to Swim Lake Huron Survives the Swim as of Noonish Today

So there's this whole Extreme Sport about swimming across the Great Lakes going on, mostly in Lake Erie and Lake Ontario for obvious reasons. They've got spans of 20 miles across instead of, you know, 40. I say that in jest, of course. It's really all the same level of impossibility to me...

...and yet today a 24 year old became the youngest swimmer to swim across Lake...

Wait...Lake HURON?!?

Whoa.

24-year-old London, Ont., man has become the youngest person to swim across Lake Huron.

Justin Kloss entered the water in Port Sanilac, Michigan on Friday morning to start the 65-kilometre journey.

He reached the shore in Grand Bend, Ont., just before noon today. Money raised from the charity swim will go to the Canadian Cancer Society.

Mr. Kloss made the swim to raise tons of cash for the Canadian Cancer Society.

Awesome.

Lake Huron Salmon Population Crashes, DNR in Retreat

It's like I've been saying, the Great Lakes are now a managed ecosystem. There's no possibility of ever returning the lake to the natural state they were in for most of ten thousand years.

The best we can hope to do is make it something we want, and protect some of the native inhabitants. The Great Lakes Fisheries Commission and other state natural resource management groups have been walking that very thin tightrope. But it's an unstable balancing act, which is yet another reason we need to reduce outside influences and factors such as invasive species.

Invasive species tipped the balance in Lake Huron to the point that an entire fishing industry has collapsed, bringing livelihoods and entire towns down with it. Chinook salmon populations have declined dramatically due to a bottom level disturbance in the food chain from invasive zebra and quagga mussels, and they have not responded to attempts at resuscitation.

The DNR is now talking about retreat in Lake Huron as far as chinook salmon is concerned and have conceded that stocking Lake Huron with that top predator is no longer a viable option.

Michigan's Department of Natural Resources still plants more than 1 million king salmon — also known as chinook salmon — into the lake each year. Most are eaten by other fish well before they reach fighting size.
This year, the state acknowledged its Lake Huron salmon-stocking program is no longer working.

department is proposing eliminating seven of nine planting locations, reducing annual chinook stocks to 730,000 and undertaking studies to determine if another high-profile predator could restore Lake Huron to its former fishing glory.

The final decision on stocking is due in October.


From The Detroit News: http://detnews.com/article/20110827/METRO/108270353/Salmon-disappear-from-Lake-Huron--towns-suffer#ixzz1WF7zAXQK

The impact of the collapse on small towns in West Michigan has been enormous...

"This place used to have a waiting list to get a slip," said Noble, 75. "Now there's five boats. At one time, there were 19 or 20 charter boats in this town. Now there is one. This town is dead. We don't even have a grocery store. … And it's not the economy. It's the fishery."
Just a decade ago, that fishery was ruled by king salmon. From Lexington in the south to the Straits of Mackinac, charter captains charged eager anglers hundreds of dollars to catch hard-fighting, great-tasting kings until coolers were brimming with fish.
Today, southern Lake Huron is virtually devoid of king salmon, thanks to food web changes wrought by invasive species like zebra and quagga mussels.

It's estimated that a new, potentially viable invasive species enters the Great Lakes EVERY EIGHT MONTHS. At an infection rate like that, there's simply no way Great Lakes fisheries management can keep up with the adaptations needed to manage the lakes and keep them in some semblance of balance.

Obviously we can't keep invasive species out 100% forever. But we CAN slow down the rate at which new invasive species are entering the lakes and give some time for the ecosystem and the fisheries to adapt.

Turning to the West, now...the pace of progress in dealing with the threat of the Asian carps is irresponsibly slow. While we watch the Lake Huron fisheries crumble, we're taking an agonizingly long time to address a similar collapse in Lake Michigan due to an Asian carp invasion.

Cutting off the the un-natural connection between the Great Lakes water basin and the Mississippi water basin is the only long term defense for both systems.

Lake Huron's Bizarre Anaerobic Ecosystems

It's been a while since I read anything more about the bizarre anaerobic ecosystems in newly discovered Lake Huron sink holes, so I thought I'd revisit the topic. The awesome thing is, I came to discover that researchers in the Grand Valley State University Annis Water Resources Facility right here in Muskegon were heading the research for these sink holes.

Awesome.

Not too long ago, Michigan researchers discovered previously unknown sink holes in Lake Huron, some of which are hundreds of feet deed, reaching down to Paleozoic era bedrock. When scientists went in to investigate them, they discovered entirely new ecosystems down there, thriving in dark anaerobic (no-oxygen), mineral rich environments.

“You have this pristine fresh water lake that has what amounts to materials from 400 million years ago … being pushed out into the lake,” said Steven A. Ruberg,

Similar to the undersea vents, these sink holes harbor odd bacteria adapted to extreme environments. They grow in large "pony-tails" or in purple towers along the bottom.

The Lake Huron sinkholes are dominated by brilliant purple mats of cyanobacteria -- cousins of microbes found on the bottom of permanently ice-covered lakes in Antarctica -- and pallid, floating pony-tails of other microbial life, according to the journal article.

The saltwater venting out of the sinkholes is hostile to most life forms because it lacks oxygen, the scientists said in the article..

Newer studies show that the water venting from the bottoms of the sink holes is warmer than the surrounding waters by an average of 5 to 10 degrees fahrenheit, with several orders of magnitude more minerals than the surrounding waters.

biogeochemical conditions (See above table). The venting water was 3.5°C warmer than the surrounding water and had 10-fold higher concentrations of chloride, 100-fold higher concentrations of sulfate, and 1000-fold higher concentrations of total phosphorus.

[snip]

The vent water also contained 5-fold higher concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and 400-fold higher concentrations of particulate organic carbon (POC)relative to the surrounding lake water

-- Article

These sink holes are a pretty new field of study...so the information will be ongoing.

Invasive Mussels Focus Toxins Near the Lakeshore

On several occasions I repeated a hypothesis I had heard that invasive mussels in the Great Lakes are concentrating lake toxins and phosphorous near the lakeshore. The hypothesis is called the "nearshore shunt hypothesis". A new study gives legs to the that idea.

How does that work?

Theoretically, invasive mussels like the zebra and quagga are so amazing at filtering water that they aren't just filtering the toxins from their local environment. Rather, they're filtering toxins and phosphorous from the whole lake and as it flows out of rivers and sequestering a high percentage of it in their bodies.

Zebra and quaggas living near a tributary or near the shore take up a high percentage of the wastes flowing into the lake, and that toxin isn't diluted like it would have been...instead it's taken up into the mussels' bodies. When they excrete wastes or when they die, they leave behind concentrated levels of lake toxins near the shorelines.

A new study suggests that this is, in fact, happening. At least with phosphorous. And phosphorous is a chemical responsible for algae blooms and ecological dead zones.

According to this so-called nearshore shunt hypothesis, the bivalve invaders absorb phosphorus when they feed on plankton and other microorganisms, and then they excrete any excess phosphorus into the sediment. Since the mussels capture phosphorus as it enters the lake from rivers, they sequester the nutrient along the lake's shallow shoreline, preventing it from reaching the rest of the lake.

[snip]

According to the scientists' model, the proportion of incoming phosphorus retained near the shore increased from 46 to 70% after the mussel invasion. Because Saginaw Bay supplies as much as 40% of Lake Huron's annual phosphorus, the bay's drop in phosphorus export could partially explain why lake phosphorus levels are so low, Stow says.

The study presents "the most convincing case" that invading mussels may intercept phosphorus in the Great Lakes and redirect it to nearshore waters,

Incoming phosphorous increased from 46% t0 70% after the mussel invasion.

I take you once again to an annually occurring algae bloom in Lake Erie visible from space....one that we thought we had taken care of for almost thirty years when we started taking steps to reduce farm runoff and reducing phosphorous levels in the lake. The bloom returned in 1995, after the invasion of the zebra mussels. There's no directly proven correlation between this algae bloom and zebra mussels at this time...but we're certainly making a first step toward solving the mystery of why we're seeing algae blooms again even though we've successfully reduced phosphorous levels in the lakes.