This winter has brought record low ice coverage across the Great Lakes system — there’s not a chunk on Lake Erie — and researchers warn there’s more at stake than skating and shinny.
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Michael McKay, executive director of the Great Lakes Institute for Environmental Research (GLIER), said the fallout from continually decreasing ice coverage includes worsening shoreline erosion and potential declines in fish populations.
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“I do most of my winter work on Lake Erie,” said McKay. “Because it’s so shallow, it’s not unusual for large portions of it to freeze over. But over the past 11, 12 years, we’ve had four years with next to no ice, which is just crazy. This is a big problem in terms of erosion. Ice cover does provide protection for the coastline. Look no further than places like Wheatley and such where you’ve got bluffs that start calving off into the lake, losing infrastructure.”
On New Year’s Day, McKay said there was less than 0.4 per cent ice coverage on the Great Lakes, and zero per cent on Lake Erie. He said this time of year would normally bring 10 per cent ice coverage across the entire Great Lakes system.
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“That amount, less than 0.4 per cent, is a record over the past 50 years they’ve been keeping these data,” McKay said.
Things have not improved over the last week.
Ace of Jan. 3, the combined ice coverage for the Great Lakes system was at 0.3 per cent, according to the Great Lakes Ice Tracker Twitter account. Lake Erie was still at zero per cent. McKay said Lake St. Clair is also at zero per cent.
“Normally at this time of year for those lakes, we should be up in the 15 to 20 per hundred coverage,” he said. “Mainly shoreline ice, some of the embayments, but we’re not seeing anything right now.”
Declining ice is a growing trend.
“The frequency of these low ice years seems to be increasing,” said McKay. “Over the entire Great Lakes, from 1973 through about 2018 or 2019, we had lost 70 percent of the ice cover. That turns about to be about five per hundred of ice cover per decade that we’re losing systemwide.”
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Erosion is one of the most visible results of the decline in ice coverage and the protection it offered. It’s not just Essex County residents who are watching their landscapes being eaten away.
“You see that a lot in southern Lake Huron as well, a lot of the bluffs on the Ontario side are being scoured,” McKay said.
“It’s all part of having to reconsider resiliency, infrastructure, in the face of this changing climate. Those are probably just matters of fact we’ll see increased into the future.”
The lack of ice could also be affecting a relatively recently discovered algae — not the toxic algae blooms that appear in summer — supporting lake food chains.
McKay’s research is partly focused on the potential “food implications” that declining ice coverage could in the Great Lakes.
He said algae are viewed as the “base of the food web, upon which all other life in the lake or sea exist.”
“And maybe one of the reasons we have a vibrant fishery in Lake Erie is because of the algae growth,” said McKay, who was part of the team that discovered the under-ice algae in 2007.
“There is some concern that with the lack of ice, these algae may have difficulty growing. Part of my research program right now is taking advantage of these years with no ice, looking at them as a window into a possible future ice-free Lake Erie. And seeing, how does the lake adapt?”
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