Around the Circle This Week: February 1, 2019

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Lakes Love Cold: Frigid temperatures do have a silver lining, especially if it’s an ice-covered one, according to a story by Kirsti Marohn for MPR News. “Experts say bitterly cold weather actually can have positive impacts on lakes from curbing the growth of harmful algae to reducing water loss,” Kirsti reports. For Lake Superior, that means less water lost to evaporation if more of the Lake is frozen. It also aids native fish species and can hamper spread of non-native species like zebra mussels, which prefer shallow waters and can be frozen out of vigorous reproduction. Another good thing about cold weather? Stunning photos like this one of Minnesota’s North Shore by Jan Swart or the lovely chilly video posted by Visit Cook County (looks beautiful and catch the sound of that ripping wind).

Hide ‘n’ Go Lake: While we were under the bone-chilling Polar Vortex, Lake Superior was contending with its own chilly cloud covering on Jan. 30 (Wednesday) this week, as shown in this satellite image from the NOAA MODIS imagery, processed at the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Meanwhile, the National Weather Service out of Marquette put out a good graphic about the warning signs of hypothermia (many of which, to this aging editor, remind me of the signs of becoming an elder). Hypothermia, of course, is no chuckling matter – heed these warning signs when you’re outside, no matter your age!

A Stout Port: The Duluth-Superior port handled 35.9 million short tons of cargo during the 2018 shipping season, with more than half of that – 21.5 million short tons – being iron ore. “Iron ore cargoes were up 9 percent year-over-year (over last year), outpacing the five-year average by 30-plus percent,” the Duluth Seaway Port Authority’s executive director, Deb DeLuca, noted in a press release this week. (Short tons, by the by, are 2,000 pounds while a long ton is 2,240 pounds.) The release also noted: “International shipping through the St. Lawrence Seaway, in and out of the Great Lakes, had its best year in more than a decade – posting a 7 percent increase over the previous season and the most since 2007. Grain exports alone posted a 20 percent year-over-year increase, virtually mirroring increased grain traffic through the Port of Duluth-Superior in 2018.”

Just One More: Not that we needed a final view of beautifully bitter cold,

Continue to read this article in Lake Superior Magazine.




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