Winter in the colder climes of North America means a lot of things – frozen lakes, white blankets of snow and, far too often, the crunch of salt crystals underfoot. While we use salt to …
Limnology 101
Winter in Wisconsin: Life on Ice
For those of us lucky enough to live where our lakes freeze in the winter, one of the true joys of the season is getting out on the ice. Suddenly, a space that was only …
Why Do We Say Lake Mendota is Frozen Before it’s Fully Frozen?
This weekend, the Center for Limnology Twitter account was tagged in a post from the UW Department of Emergency Medicine’s chief flight physician and pilot, Mike Abernethy, who had been flying a helicopter over Lake …
Where Does Lake Mendota’s Freeze Date Fall in Historic Average?
In case you missed the news, Lake Mendota was officially deemed “frozen” by the Wisconsin State Climatology Office on Sunday. That January 3rd “ice on” date is about two weeks later than the median freeze …
Learn Your Lakes. What’s a Watershed?
Last week was the first time in a while that hunkering down at home for days on end was a response to weather and not a decision driven by spiking COVID numbers. Here in south/central …
Guest Post: How Madison’s Lakes Came to Be
Holding History, a UW-Madison-based project, helps students explore how cultural knowledge is made and preserved and share what they learn with broader audiences. Their series, Water Lines, is produced by 2019 Trout Lake Station summer …
Cool Weather Means Clear Waters for Wisconsin Lakes
Most people think of green, algae-filled waters when talking about southern Wisconsin lakes. And, sure, these highly productive bodies are full of nutrients that run off from the landscape and feed huge algae blooms every …
Someone Put the 25 Largest Lakes on Earth in One Map. So What, Exactly, is a Lake?
A couple of days ago the picture above caught our attention on Twitter and we retweeted it. The folks at a website called the Visual Capitalist had used a nifty online tool called “Slap It …
“Between Two Lakes” – UW-Madison Journalism Students Cap Off Semester with Multimedia Extravaganza
A few weeks back, the inboxes of faculty, staff and students at Hasler Lab were flooded with requests for interviews about our work on Madison’s lakes. As we tried to field as many requests as …
Video: Limnology 101 – Lake Stratification
CFL graduate student, Colin Smith, produced and narrated this first video in our new “Limnology 101” series. Here he explains why lakes separate into warm, upper layers and cold, bottom layers. Check it out! Stay …