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New York, like the nation and world, has big plans for using offshore wind power as a way of reducing carbon emissions and the severity of climate change. Recently we learned that the Adirondacks — far inland from the Atlantic Coast — will play a role in helping make that successful.
Posts Tagged ‘water line’
Watching the Wind and Water
Pollution is a rural problem, too
Water pollution is a big concern for us here in the Adirondack Park, and we’re not just talking about the kind that wafts in from out-of-state smokestacks and deposits acid in our lakes.
The lakes don’t look like they used to
Over the past year, I’ve tried to gather data on the health of Adirondack lakes, despite major gaps.
So when a researcher emailed me out of the blue to say he’d just done a study of how lakes were recovering from acid rain and changing colors, I gave him a call.
The researcher, Paul Bukaveckas, is a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University. But he was here a few decades ago studying the effects of acid rain on Adirondack lakes in the late 1980s.
His new research, which brought him back to 20 Adirondack lakes in recent years, helps confirm what a few people have started talking about: As lakes recover from the effects of acid rain they are turning browner. That’s a good thing, unlike the brown in other lakes that may be the result of pollution.
A lawsuit, a lake and a marina
Last week, I looked at some broader issues raised by a lawsuit over a marina expansion on Lower Saranac Lake.
The dispute is often cast as one among a neighbor — Thomas Jorling, the former head of the state’s environmental conservation agency — and the marina owner and the agencies allowing the marina expansion. But the lawsuit touches on issues that have bedeviled the region for decades, including the amount of study that needs to be done before development can be allowed in the Adirondack Park.
Go Fish: Stocking Saranac River Salmon
Regional fishery folks are testing new ways of getting salmon ready for the Saranac River, a river salmon once thrived in but were blocked from 200 years ago by dams.
I explored the relationship among the river, the dams and the salmon in a series of stories last year. This spring, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation plans to stock salmon in the river, which it has done for years, but this time keep some in a pen for several weeks. In the pen, the fish, who were born in a hatchery, will be fed and cared for by Trout Unlimited. The idea is these fish will have a better chance to survive and learn the river before they leave it for Lake Champlain. That learning, called imprinting, might make it more likely for the salmon to return to the river to spawn in years to come.
Regulating road salt like acid rain
Several decades ago, acid rain in the Adirondacks helped direct the nation’s attention to new kinds of air pollution.
Despite the local environmental protections here, acids were being carried from coal-fired power plants elsewhere in the country by the atmosphere and falling into Adirondack lakes and streams, killing off fish. The regulatory boundary protecting the park’s forests and wetlands from development and logging weren’t going to stop that.
A national problem needed a national solution. So, in 1990, Congress updated the Clean Air Act to crack down on polluters.
A recent paper, authored by researchers at the University of Maryland, argues that salt pollution, including pollution from road salt, may be so ubiquitous that it now needs such a national solution. “Ultimately,” the paper says, “there may be a need for regulations similar to the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments, which were enacted to address pollution from acid rain.”
Keeping an eye on dirt
There are a lot of rivers, streams and lakes to visit. For casual observers, it’s sometimes hard to tell how natural they are. Last year, I spent some time digging into all the ways that dams along the Saranac River change the flow of water and the life of fish.
But dams change something else, too: dirt.
Dams hold back and can suddenly release dirt, or they change the way water flows and those changes, in turn, change how sand and gravel build up both before and after dams’ spot in the river. Whole books, including the classic textbook Fluvial Processes in Geomorphology, have been written on these changes to dirt accumulation, usually known by the more technical word “sediment.”
Money for Lake Champlain water quality projects
Recently, I wrote about the Adirondack Council asking the state to fund a wide-ranging study of water quality across the Adirondacks. (Speaking of the Council, it just hired someone away from Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s office to be its new vice president for conservation.)
I’ve been thinking about how much the public conversation is influenced by money — not just advertising and p.r., but money or lack of money for research.
There’s something about the weather….
There’s something about the weather, particularly when it comes to hydrology, that creates an almost eye-rolling cycle of stories. If it’s not too dry, it’s too wet. With a changing climate, the normal also changes — for instance, while reporting a story on pollution running into Lake Champlain, I heard from officials on both sides of the lake that they’re seeing more rain and storms so intense they’re called “rain bombs,” a recipe for uncontrolled flashes of water that sweep pollution into the lake from fields and streets.
Some people notice all this. Others do not.
Two years ago, while I was reporter in the Southwest and had spent a few years covering a major drought, we had what seemed like an awfully rainy and cold winter for that part of the world. A few people I talked to regularly said, Oh yeah, this is strange weather for here. So, I called the National Weather Service and asked, Ain’t it awfully rainy and cold? Not really, the local meteorologist replied, it was only the 55th coldest stretch on record.
Such is the nature of human perception: We forget what happened or remember things that didn’t.
Let’s talk about bats, EPA and more
This Friday, the Explorer is hosting an online discussion with me and other Explorer reporters. Join us, if you can. Click here to sign up, and feel free to share with a friend.
There’s plenty we can talk about. For now, I wanted to share two recent stories, one on the Trump administration and the other on bats:
Diving into 2021’s water reporting
It’s 2021, and there’s lots to do.
I’ll keep investigating waters of the Adirondacks. Stories about what’s still wild, about what has been changed, and about what is at risk of ruin.
Water? That seems niche, one might say. But water is everywhere — and where it isn’t is also a story.
All of our greatest stories involve water. The baffling story about the punishment of Moses for bringing it out of a rock. The story about the reflective trap of Narcissus. Native American stories that focus on the turtle, straddler of water and land.
Lessons learned from water
From water we can learn that:
One can never step in the same river twice. (Attributed to Heraclitus.)
Ripple in still water…when there is no pebble tossed nor wind to blow. (Grateful Dead)
What goes up must come down. (Everyone.)
As the year’s closing, I’ve been thinking about the lessons taught by the concept of retention time. That’s the average time water stays in a lake or pond. Think of it as the effect before has on after.
Your help needed in obtaining water quality reports
(Calling all citizen scientists! The following is from Water Line, a weekly newsletter by Adirondack Explorer water reporter Ry Rivard.)
Late last year, I began requesting documents from the state of New York to help me understand who around the Adirondacks may be drinking potentially unsafe water.
While larger communities in the state of New York post their annual drinking water quality reports online, not all smaller communities do this.
New York is notoriously slow in responding to requests for public records. To give state officials the benefit of the doubt, it’s a big state and a lot of people want to know things about it. The other explanation is that government officials like to control information, particularly information that might scare people or make themselves look bad.
Latest News Headlines
- Fort Drum helicopters to train over Adirondacks in August
- Future of some snowmobile trails remains murky after court decision
- North Country making final push for universal broadband
- A summer working on the Northern Forest Canoe Trail
- As caterpillars turn into gypsy moths, a respite for trees
- State preserves 8,000 acres in St. Lawrence County
- Locals and landlords square off over short-term rentals
- Residents Of Upstate New York Eagerly Await Reopening Of U.S-Canadian Border
- State grinds railroad ties in Lake Clear
- Experience Outdoors in Lake Placid faces backlash from neighbors
Latest News Headlines
- Fort Drum helicopters to train over Adirondacks in August
- Future of some snowmobile trails remains murky after court decision
- North Country making final push for universal broadband
- A summer working on the Northern Forest Canoe Trail
- As caterpillars turn into gypsy moths, a respite for trees
- State preserves 8,000 acres in St. Lawrence County
- Locals and landlords square off over short-term rentals
- Residents Of Upstate New York Eagerly Await Reopening Of U.S-Canadian Border
- State grinds railroad ties in Lake Clear
- Experience Outdoors in Lake Placid faces backlash from neighbors
The Adirondack Almanack
The Adirondack Almanack is a public forum dedicated to promoting and discussing current events, history, arts, nature and outdoor recreation and other topics of interest to the Adirondacks and its communities
We publish commentary and opinion pieces from voluntary contributors, as well as news updates and event notices from area organizations. Contributors include veteran local writers, historians, naturalists, and outdoor enthusiasts from around the Adirondack region. The information, views and opinions expressed by these various authors are not necessarily those of the Adirondack Almanack or its publisher, the Adirondack Explorer.
General inquiries about the Adirondack Almanack should be directed to editor Melissa Hart.
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Lake Champlain trout rebound
But as I was checking in on plans to reduce the amount of trout being stocked in Lake Champlain by New York’s hatcheries, I found that sometimes invasive species might have unexpectedly positive roles.
Hatchery officials who once worried they weren’t stocking enough trout now have to worry they’ll stock too many, because the trout are beginning to breed on their own in the lake. There are now perhaps 100,000 or 200,000 trout in the lake. Too many trout in one lake could collapse the food chain, if too many eat too much.
Why? Some new theories suggest Lake Champlain trout may be rebounding in part of changes in the lake driven by invasive species giving them new food and forcing them to breed in better parts of the lake.
Those twin changes — the rebound of wild trout in the lake and the potential role of invasive species in that rebound — prompted a quick piece that’s now online from the current print issue of Adirondack Explorer, which you can read here.
Photo of lake trout courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
This first appeared in Ry’s weekly “Water Line” newsletter. Click here to sign up.