The following is an excerpt from an excellent article on Madison-based science writer, Erik Ness’ website ‘The Lemonadist.’ The full article is available here. 3/12/24 – by Erik Ness “I think about Ice Nine on a regular basis.” Coming in the middle of a conversation about salt pollution, this surprising detour into literary fiction by …
Tourist towns along the Lake Michigan shoreline love to proclaim the giant body of water “Unsalted and Shark-Free.” The slogan is plastered on t-shirts, magnets and bumper stickers but, according to a study published December 15th in the journal, Limnology and Oceanography Letters, only one of those claims holds water. Combined, the Great Lakes make …
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Many North American lakes are getting saltier, thanks primarily to the road salt used to keep winter roads free of ice and snow. While this salt can keep precipitation from freezing on surfaces, it also ends up flowing into nearby waterways – especially as warmer temperatures melt piles of plowed snow …
This year marks the second season for our ambitious winter limnology experiment up in Vilas County. In case you missed our initial post about why in the world someone would spend all winter plowing a frozen bog every time it snowed, here’s a link to the full story. The short version is this: As climate …
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 keep roads, parking lots and sidewalks ice-free, those leftover piles of undissolved crystals mean far too much salt was put …
by Eric Hamilton, University Communications – For 166 years, observers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the Wisconsin State Climatology Office have recorded a central aspect of life in the city — the dates when Lake Mendota freezes and thaws. Those dates mark the transition from fishing to ice fishing, from canoeing to snow shoeing. …
The above picture shows CFL assistant professor Hilary Dugan and a giant pile of rock salt. It is so much salt. How much? Well, this particular pile belongs to the Jefferson County Highway Department and it’s not uncommon for them to dump literal tons of salt onto county roads and Interstate 94 during an extended …
by Kelly Tyrrell, UW-Madison Communications FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – MADISON, WI – Road salt is making North America’s freshwater lakes saltier, according to a new study published today [April 10, 2017] in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, conducted by a team of 15 researchers with the Global Lake Ecological Observatory …
Despite existing in the extreme cold desert of Antarctica’s McMurdo Dry Valleys, there is liquid water beneath the permanently frozen surface of one of the valley’s largest lakes. A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters says that, while this ancient, super salty aquifer doesn’t provide anything like the water humans pull out of the ground …
Welcome to our new recurring blog feature – Field Samples. We’ve got so much cool research going on at the Center for Limnology, that it’s hard to keep track. So, each week, we’ll do a Q&A with a faculty member, post doc or grad student and see what they’ve been up to, where it’s taken …