The Good and The Bad

The Good and The Bad

Sunday July 24th, 2011

The good: we saw beautiful things today… as usual :)
The bad: the impacts of mining and I lost my camera. :( bummer. From here on out, you will see pictures lent to me from my peers.

We had a very busy day on land. We started the day off hearing from Dr. Joel Hoffman from the EPA’s National Health and Environmental Effects Research Lab in Duluth speak about coastal wetlands. He covered different wetland formations, their functions, and the kinds of ways humans have disrupted them. Of course there were many take-away messages from his presentation, but did you know that it is impossible to have estuaries in Duluth? The word estuary comes from the Latin words for boil/surge and it is in reference to the meeting of a freshwater river and an ocean. Again, not that important, but it struck me.

We then packed lunches for ourselves and headed for land to meet with professors from Michigan Tech department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Dr. Marty Auer met with us first and gave us a tour of their new building that will be used for limnology, outreach, and other research.

He also talked to us about the research that Michigan Tech is undergoing with fish restoration, exotic species, sediments, and low impact development. We then got to participate in some of his outreach programming. We checked out plankton under a microscope connected to a large monitor; very cool. I had never seen them in such detail before and am starting to get the knack of identifying them. He had this awesome geology lesson about how rock travels around the shore. He had 6 samples, bedrock, large rock, stones, pebbles, sand, and clay. We were to line them up in order of how we see them on the shore and discuss why this happens. He, unfortunately, didn’t have a lesson plan to outline all the great stuff he told us and I’m not sure if I can remember all the details, but I would certainly like to try that in our Great Lakes Aquarium classroom.

THEN, he had the coolest station of cutting open lake trout stomachs. He was right; it was like Christmas. I found smelt and herring inside the stomachs. I would definitely like to try this at the aquarium. He has local fishermen give him buckets of lake trout guts that they would have otherwise thrown away. Kids then get to slice them open and see what they find. AND sometimes we could slice the smelt open to find a tummy full of zooplankton. Awesome. I’d love to do something like that at the aquarium.

Dr. Charles Kerfoot, a biologist and geologist at Michigan Tech, then took us on a tour to abandoned mining sites to discuss and see their effect on the landscape. I had no idea that copper mining was so expansive in the Keweenaw Peninsula. I also had no idea how destructive it was. First the rock containing copper is mined, it’s then “stamped” into smaller pieces, and smelted (melted) so that the rock layers separate and the copper sinks. When the smelting process happens, arsenic, chromium, copper, lead, mercury, and other metals are released into the environment. The piles of stamp sand lies just about everywhere. The landscape may look lush and green, but actually is leaching these hard metals.

Mining equipment was left in many places around the area

(the stamper)


In 1940, 16 million tons of stamp sand were dumped on Torch lake site right on the shore of Lake Superior making it one of the world’s largest superfund site. AND the local city uses the stamp sand for ice in the winter! Absolutely boggles the mind. Arial views of the beach show the sand being washed further down the shore.

Despite the stamp sand, I was struck by the beautiful sandstone that lined the South Shore. It was such a different experience to be standing in Lake Superior picking sandstone instead of igneous rocks.

After dinner, we cruised out of the Keweenaw Canal. Next stop: the deep open waters.