Yesterday afternoon, eight brave souls decided to abandon their desks and help CFL facility manager, Dave Harring, put the Hasler Lab dock out into Lake Mendota. It was an unusual sight for March 20th to say the least – 80 degree weather, crew boats gliding past us on the water – but it appears field …

While it wasn’t a record-setting early date for Lake Mendota to return to its more, um, liquid state this year, the official March 10th “ice-off” date is right in line with the long term trend that’s moving Mendota’s typical melt date from early April (as was the norm 100 years ago) to early March over …

Last week, I ventured out on the ice of Lake Mendota as Ted Bier, senior research specialist for the North Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research study (LTER), drilled through the ice to take samples in the open water below. Bier mentioned that the ice, at 17 centimeters thick, was thinner than usual, but I …

(Go Here to see Slideshow) On February 22nd, Ted Bier, senior research specialist for the North Temperate Lakes Long Term Ecological Research study (LTER) and Dave Harring, the Center for Limnology’s facility manager, walked a few hundred meters off shore onto the Lake Mendota ice to take a battery of samples for the LTER. The …

Well, that’s one way of getting rid of surplus sodium. Thankfully, what is/isn’t an appropriate use of our freshwater lakes seems to have evolved a bit since the late 1940’s. The unfortunate scene of this science experiment is Lake Lenore in eastern Washington State. While the effusive narrator states “the alkali lake is devoid of …

Thanks to our friends at the UW–Madison archives, the forefather of modern limnology, E.A. Birge, is on YouTube! For your viewing pleasure, We present this 30 second silent film of Birge in his campus lab circa 1929. E.A. Birge in his lab, circa 1929  

Several years ago, Jon Temte, a professor in the UW–Madison Department of Family Medicine, got interested in the variation of flu season from year to year in Wisconsin. He brought an undergraduate student into the study and began to have her look at all sorts of long-term datasets, from the dates of major winter holidays …

We here at the CFL have been eagerly awaiting word so we could anoint the winner of our annual Lake Mendota “Ice On” pool. Well, the state climatology office has made it official – our fair lake finally donned its winter mantle of ice on January 14th. (Congrats are in order to payroll and benefits …

When most people think of eels, they immediately turn their thoughts to the ocean. Perhaps, even, to the “electrical” variety. But there was a time in this country when eels inhabited nearly every river and stream east of the Mississippi. The American eel spawns in a region of the Atlantic Ocean called the Sargasso Sea. …