A NASA planetary expedition blasted off amid much fanfare this month to probe what scientists think is an underground salty ocean that could support life on one of Jupiter’s moons, Europa.
The Great Lakes Observing System (GLOS), an international non-profit research and advocacy group, just wants to map the Great Lakes — all of them.
NASA said its probe, its biggest planetary mission ever, will begin its work in April 2030, commencing 49 flybys of the moon.
GLOS aims to complete its mapping by 2030. The project it’s spearheading is called Lakebed 2030.
NASA’s ultimate goal with its Europa Clipper mission is to document whether a salty ocean, if it exists, has the ingredients necessary to sustain life.
GLOS has multiple goals with its mission, three of which include:
- FINDING SHIP AND PLANE WRECKS: “There are approximately 8,000 wrecks — shipwrecks and aircraft — missing in the Great Lakes and a small percentage, around 25 per cent, have been discovered — probably less,” said Tim Kearns, GLOS’s chief information officer, in a recent interview. “And so being able to understand and document where those wrecks are, being able to preserve them, inform the family members of people who were lost, of their location is also really important.”
- FINDING CULTURAL ARTIFACTS: “There’s also a lot of civilization and cultural artifacts that are on the lake floor that need to be preserved, protected, understood and documented,” he said.
- MAPPING PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY: “We can’t really model or understand underwater processes … if we don’t really understand the shape and (topography) of the lake floor.
Not that GLOS expects to find something like the Pacific Ocean’s Mariana Trench hidden in the middle of Lake Superior, although he said the newly established Wisconsin shipwreck sanctuary in Lake Michigan got a surprise when they took a closer look at their lake bed floor.
They found “all these giant sinkholes — what we believe are sinkholes,” said Kearns. “It’s unknown what they are. These are giant depressions in the lake floor. They sort of look like crop circles, kind of, but on the bottom of the lake. And we don’t really understand the processes that caused them.”
ONLY 15 PER CENT MAPPED SO FAR
About 15 per cent of the Great Lakes have already been mapped, he said, explaining that “all of the mapping that’s been done thus far has been a bit of a patchwork quilt.”
The United States Army Corp of Engineers, he said, has done “a phenomenal job” mapping the coast line and the shallow water areas on the U.S. side.
On the Canadian side he said Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Canadian Hydrographic Service have done “a fair bit of mapping, particularly around the navigable waterways.”
Any areas used by shipping, he said, are basically well mapped.
Other areas have had targeted surveys, he said, such as the U.S. Thunder Bay marine sanctuary on the western side of Lake Huron.
“There’s a huge area that has been mapped there by that marine sanctuary.”
A very large area on the north shore of Lake Superior has also been mapped, he said, by the Canadian Hydrographic Service “in preparation for Arctic surveys using uncrewed surface vessels.”
Other smaller “bits and pieces,” he said, have come in from a crowd sourced program GLOS has developed in partnership with Orange Force Marine using research or even fishing vessels that have a “low-cost fish finder or echo sounder on board,” he said.
“We’ve collected 25 million soundings in Lake Ontario and Lake Erie alone in the last three years.”
$200 MILLION NEEDED TO MAP THE REMAINING 85%
As for the remaining 85 per cent yet to be mapped, he said GLOS has “identified that we would need about $200 million (U.S.) to map all of the Great Lakes in its entirety.”
GLOS, he added, is “pursuing different funding mechanisms to raise that kind of funding.”
A bill — the Great Lakes Mapping Act — was tabled in the U.S. Congress earlier this year with GLOS CEO Jennifer Boehme explaining that, “This type of mapping will support protection of drinking water pipelines for major cities in the region, it supports coastal access for commercial fishing and anglers and recreational use of the Great Lakes coast.
“So this bill would support a drinkable, swimmable, fishable Great Lakes.”
And although the bill is unlikely to get passed before the Nov. 5 U.S. election Kearns said GLOS has at least made its case.
In the meantime, he said “we’re trying to encourage anyone who is collecting data in the Great Lakes … to contribute that data to GLOS.”
A “perfect example,” he said, is Travis White of Michigan Technological University who was partnering with some technology companies to try some new technology in the search for a missing National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) plane carrying two pilots and a graduate student that disappeared over Lake Superior in 1968.
“We said, ‘If you’re going to be collecting data in this 45 square miles, would you contribute that data to the Lakebed 2030 effort?’”
They did, and as a result there’s “another small piece of Lake Superior that has been mapped.”
“It only amounts to 0.14 per cent but it’s 0.14 per cent more than we had a month ago.”
MAPPING BY SATELLITE, PLANE, BOAT AND SUBMERSIBLE
A number of technologies, he said, are employed in this ambitious task, including satellites, airborne technologies using laser instruments, surface vessels (crewed and uncrewed) using echo sounders “and then the last piece of the puzzle,” he said, under-water submersibles which can go in and provide “very high resolution images” for areas of interest than the more general mapping may find.
For instance, in the search for the NCAR missing plane, he said uncrewed underwater vehicles were used to inspect targets of interest that were identified from the surface.
1 TO 5 METRE RESOLUTION
The mapping resolution they’re aiming at, he said, “is one per cent of water depth.”
“So in the shallower areas, let’s say Lake Erie, that means we’re able to get sub one-metre resolution.
“But in the deeper waters, Lake Superior, for instance, we’d be looking at about a five-metre resolution.”
Both, he said, are “exponentially” better than the current resolution of about 500 metres.
DATA PUBLICLY AVAILABLE
All of the data, he said, is publicly available through the NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in the U.S. and the Canadian Hydrographic Service where people can access what Canada calls NONNA (non navigational data).”
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