Teach Me About the Great Lakes

We discuss the origin story of the Great Lakes and, because the show is 2/3 Canadian this month, hockey.

Show Notes

For a rough transcript of this episode, please visit https://github.com/jscarlton/teachgreatlakes/blob/master/episode-2/tmatgl-2-transcript.markdown

Today’s hosts:
Today’s guests:
Links
Other credits

Podcast theme by Stuart Carlton. Interstitial music provided by Pepouni and by audionautix.com, both under a Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported  — CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

Creators & Guests

Host
Stuart Carlton
Stuart Carlton is the Assistant Director of the Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant College Program. He manages the day-to-day operation of IISG and works with the IISG Director and staff to coordinate all aspects of the program. He is also a Research Assistant Professor and head of the Coastal and Great Lakes Social Science Lab in the Department of Forestry & Natural Resources at Purdue, where he and his students research the relationship between knowledge, values, trust, and behavior in complex or controversial environmental systems.

What is Teach Me About the Great Lakes?

A monthly podcast in which Stuart Carlton (a native New Orleanian) asks smart people to teach him about the Great Lakes. Co-hosted by the awesome staff at Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant.

Disclaimer: This is an automated transcript, we apologize for any errors. If you notice any problems, please email the show at teachmeaboutthegreatlakes@gmail.com. Thank you.

Stuart Carlton 0:07
Welcome to episode two of teach me about the Great Lakes a podcast in which I, A Great Lakes novice get people who are smarter than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes. My name is Stuart Carlton and I work with Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and with me, as always is Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant Research Coordinator, Carolyn Foley Carolyn, how are you?

Carolyn Foley 0:27
I'm doing well. Thanks, Stuart. How are you doing?

Stuart Carlton 0:29
I am also doing well, thanks, I'm super fired up to be here for Episode Two, I learned a lot in recording episode one. In addition to learning a bunch about microplastics, I also learned that I speak too fast. I say, a lot. And instead of my room being an anechoic chamber, my room is an echo chamber. So that was kind of an unfortunate thing to find out during the editing phase. But we're back now we've learned a bunch, and we're ready to roll. So this week, you know, I was thinking after listening to the last episode that I really want to get a big picture of understanding of what's going on in the Great Lakes. But before I can do that, I thought it would be really nice to go back to very first principles. I don't even know almost literally the first thing about the Great Lakes right now. And I would like to figure that out. And so to do that, I contacted Professor Michael Twiss, who is a professor of biology at Clarkson University. And so I thought it would be cool to talk to him about some basics about the Great Lakes. So let's bring on Dr. Twist. Hello, Michael, can you hear us? Yes, I can. Thank you so much for coming on. Teach me about the Great Lakes. So tell us a little bit about what you do over a clerk soon. Well, Stuart,

Dr. Michael Twiss 1:38
I am a professor of biology. And I teach a course called Great Lakes water protection. And I also teach a course called limnology. So limnology is not the study of arms and legs, how limnology is essentially freshwater oceanography. So it's the study of lakes, rivers, and wetlands, and also teach microbiology on the side and botany. So that's all.

Stuart Carlton 2:08
So how do you? So how are those connected? limnology? Like freshwater oceanography, is that mainly about lakes? Or is that about? You know, so the rivers, how are those connected? Are they very similar? So I took a stream ecology course, but nothing in limnology?

Dr. Michael Twiss 2:22
Right? Yeah. So stream ecology would be part of limnology. Just like oceanography has physical, chemical and biological components. limnology has the same. So there are physical and ologists. There are chemical and ologists, and biological immunologists, in my course that I teach, I teach all those three components, because you need to understand all of them. In order to understand your lake or your river or your stream. I also teach a an aspect of phonology, which I considered to be sustainability. So you know, our use of freshwaters. And are they sustainable? So I've added a new sort of component to the classical, three, three components.

Stuart Carlton 3:05
So it seems like you're just the right person then to go into this topic. So thinking about the Great Lakes, it occurred to me that I don't even know where they came from, right? These are huge bodies of water. If I'm right, are they the largest inland lakes in the world, if not, they're among them.

Dr. Michael Twiss 3:21
They're the largest system, the largest system of freshwater lakes. So from the point of view of surface area, they they connect it all together, they create the largest freshwater system on the surface of the earth. There's one other lake on called Lake Baikal in Russia, since Iberia, and it has as much water as the Great Lakes, but it's far deeper. And it's far smaller than the entire surface here,

Stuart Carlton 3:50
the Great Lakes. So it's got a lot more depth to it.

Dr. Michael Twiss 3:53
It's got much more depth. Yeah, it's like four, four kilometers deep, to the four kilometers deep with at least six kilometers of sediments. So it's an ancient lake. Whereas the Great Lakes of North America are are young. They're like 10,000 years old. So they are relatively recent feature on the surface of the earth. So there were people before the Great Lakes, and obviously, there's people after the Great Lakes. So when we look at them, we consider them to be very young lakes.

Stuart Carlton 4:26
Yeah. So 10,000 years, so they're younger than agriculture. I guess.

Dr. Michael Twiss 4:31
They're the same age. Yeah, yeah.

Stuart Carlton 4:33
So how did they get there? Were people already in that area? And then the lakes. I mean, what I mean, there's not a volcano that created lakes or an earthquake or something like that. What How did it go from no water to a bunch of water right there.

Dr. Michael Twiss 4:45
Okay, so to answer your first question, yes, there were people around the Great Lakes when they were forming. And in fact, there are people in the Great Lakes Basin, the Amish Nabil, who have stories about there being ice And proglacial lakes. And so that's quite intriguing. There's also some archaeological evidence that people were doing caribou hunting on what would have been tundra on Yankee reef and in Lake Huron 10,000 years ago when when the lakes were actually in a drier stage, and then they filled up. That's that. That is pretty, pretty awesome. So we we consider a water level changes to have a real big impact on how we interact with the lakes nowadays. And but when you think about it, there are people that were living there, and they adapted to that water level change, which is quite drastic, that's like 50 meters. So looking to the future, we can probably look to the past to realize that oh, people, people got by. So getting back to the, the origin, the Great Lakes. We can take a really deep dive and go back a billion years. Okay, so the Earth is about 4 billion years old. And so a billion years ago, there is a supercontinent called Rodinia. Romania Rodinia. Yeah. And there were landmasses that were part of it like tectonic plates, and they pushed together, and they formed this mountain chain, and had no name because it's never noted. What it would, what it looked like, what we can estimate that it was higher than the Himalayas. And, and it was read over the Great Lakes. And now you're probably being pretty skeptical about that, because that's impossible. But if you go to Lake Huron, for example, and you go to Georgian Bay, where the bedrock is read, exposed to the surface of the lake and the insect, potentially, there's rock, and then there's air, or rock and water and air, you can actually see the roots of that mountain system. And they can, they've done a lot of geology to determine what the age was geology to determine what the heat must have been. And from that, they can determine how high they were. So that's a billion years ago, and they're gone. And they're gone because of erosion. And time, and so it acted to take all that material out into the Atlantic Ocean and into the rest of the earth. Sorry, North America. And so that's part of it. So there's erosion. And there's also these drastic events that occur occasionally. And we're currently in one right now and glaciation. So if you look at sort of a globe, or a map or Google Earth, you'll notice that there's large chunks of ice on the surface of the earth. Sure. Look at Antarctica, you look at Greenland. Okay, so those, those are the remnants of glaciers that were quite larger during the last glaciation and thinking of Greenland, that's the one that's closest to us. That ice cap extended down through North America, especially the northern reaches of it, and it's now retreating. And unfortunately, it's retreating at a rate which is unprecedented. But that is how the current shape of the Great Lakes was formed. So there is a glazier called the Laurentide ice sheet. And Lauren tight. Yeah. And Laurentide is, is named after Laurentia, which is this old part of Virginia. So that's where the name came from.

Stuart Carlton 8:28
All right, so that's when you hear about the Lorentzian Great Lakes. Is that related to the same thing, then?

Dr. Michael Twiss 8:33
That's right. Yeah. So we call them the North American Great Lakes or the Laurentian Great Lakes. And that's to distinguish them from other great lakes around the Earth, like the African Great Lakes, which have a totally different origin. They're, they're formed by the continent of Africa, splitting apart. And it's creating these riffs or troughs, and they fill fill the water and they fill for water. So they have a different origin. So the Great Lakes are actually very shallow compared to the Great Lakes, like, like super shallow.

Stuart Carlton 9:07
How shallow are they? Well,

Dr. Michael Twiss 9:09
they're so shallow that well, when we do research in on Lake Erie, we've joked that if the ship ever sinks in the central basin, all you have to do is climb up on the mast and be out. And so, yeah, when you think about it, there you are. And the lakes are so large that you can't see the shore. But it's really shallow. It's so you think of it almost like a film of water with a surface. I think the maximum depth is like 400 meters, 600 meters out in Lake Superior. So but they're very large, they're very large. But if you if you do it to scale, if you draw a map of it to scale, it's it's a really a thin film of water on the surface of the earth. But it's all freshwater. And that's amazing that it's freshwater. Yeah.

Carolyn Foley 9:55
So can I ask a question? So you talk about great lakes and things like that. And so there are loads and loads and loads of tiny inland lakes, right? What is the definition that makes a lake? Great?

Dr. Michael Twiss 10:12
Okay, so the lipid ologists, Great Lakes of knowledge just kind of go by a rule of thumb that it's got to be like 500 kilometers squared in surface area. And so that would be a lake that's about 13 miles by 13 miles, if it was a square, it was a square like. And so what happens when a leak is is that size is that it behaves a lot differently than a smaller leak, you get, you know, currents like you can get currents caused by Coriolis effects. And that you don't get in a small leak because they don't have the same mass. Whereas in larger lakes, you end up with these larger masses. So you have a physically quite a different system.

Carolyn Foley 11:00
And I'll just, so I'm a fellow born in Canada now lives in the US. So I just want to say really quickly, because I get a lot of grief about talking in the metric system. About three feet in one meter.

Dr. Michael Twiss 11:14
Yeah, about three feet one meter. Yeah. So the what I use for a rule of thumb is, is 100 kilometers is 60 miles. So when you're driving down the road in Canada, you're, you're going about 100 kilometers an hour or a mile a minute.

Carolyn Foley 11:31
So you feel like you go to places a lot faster in Canada when you're driving down the highway, like, yeah, this Yeah.

Dr. Michael Twiss 11:38
And the temperature is a lot colder. And notice it'll go from 32 to zero.

I'm also going to talk a bit about the Seiler in C. Now, yeah, the Siberian sea was after the the the mountains were long gone. But 600 million years after that, and I'm hoping not putting you guys to sleep like a fairy tale or something. But no, I think this is fascinating. Okay. Yeah, the saline sea was an inland sea. And it was created around 440 million years ago. And we can see the remnants of it today. In fact, if you look at your window right now, you can probably see some remnants of it as well. And I'm talking road salt.

Stuart Carlton 12:33
Ah, so now the wind is blowing so hard in West Lafayette that I think all of the road salt has was blown into the Siberian sea. But

Dr. Michael Twiss 12:42
now to me, okay, so the, the Siberian sea was an inland sea very warm. It was before dinosaurs. There's a lot of aquatic life like portals and all sorts of creatures. And the deposits of the Siberian sea are now found, as limestone deposits all around the Great Lakes. So Manitoulin Island, is all this old limestone that was formed back then Niagara Falls, the limestone there, that's the water cascades over. It's the remnants of the Siberian sea. And if you look out on the map of the Great Lakes from Michigan, down and around, up through Ohio, Pennsylvania, and then to New York, and then up the Bruce peninsula, and then over to Manitoulin Island, it's like a circle. And that's the the basin of the Siberian seas, all those deposits of creatures that created the limestone are left now it's rock. And below it is there are deposits of salt, and also deposits of oil and gas. And so if you're going through Michigan, it's fine as a board on the lower part around Saginaw Bay, and that's kinda like the middle of the seat. And they're they pump oil there they pump oil in southwestern Ontario. And that's because these these these organisms that lived in that sea for millions of years, died and were buried and created oil deposits, and the evaporation left salt deposits which we mined, and we actually distributed all around to control our roads for winter winter management, unfortunately.

Stuart Carlton 14:23
So if there's all the salt there, why it why why is it that why are the Great Lakes saline? Why are why are they filled with saltwater?

Dr. Michael Twiss 14:30
That's a good question. Actually, in Saginaw Bay, salt does diffuse out of that salt deposit into the water above, but the rate of diffusion is really low. And we get a lot of water in the Great Lakes, a lot of water through rain. So we talked about these these these glaciers that melted. Well, that water is long gone. Because the water in the Great Lakes only hangs around around 600 years which is a long time for us, but on geological time. and skill that water is has come into the lakes and flowed out. The reason why they don't get salty is because the Great Lakes are X ray IK. So I'll repeat that word again, x ray IQ. And what does it mean? Well, it means that limnol Just make up lots of words for things. But an x ray Lake is a lake that is connected to the ocean. So if you think of the Great Lakes there are connected by rivers, the St. Marys River, the St. Clair River, the Detroit River, the Niagara River, and all the water eventually flows out naturally through the St. Lawrence River to the North Atlantic Ocean. Okay. If you think of Lake Baikal has a river that flows north into the Arctic Ocean. Lake Geneva is a great lake between France and Switzerland, the Alps, and it flows out through the room. And so those are X ray lakes. And so because of that, the water flows in and flows out. There are some leaks however, that are we call indirect. And so the water doesn't flow out of them, the rivers flow in and then it doesn't connect to the ocean, and it doesn't seep down into the earth. And so water just evaporates. Great Salt Lake out in Utah is an example of an indirect lake where the rivers and streams flow into it. But there's no connection to the ocean, the water evaporates, and all the dilute salts that are in the streams, eventually concentrated in the lake making it salty. And if you go to the Middle East, there's the Sea of Galilee, or lake Kinneret, which is an x ray Lake because the water flows out the River Jordan, down into the Dead Sea. And in the Dead Sea, there's no connection to the, to the ocean, the water just stops there, and then evaporates. And that's a really super salty, like, wow,

Stuart Carlton 16:49
this is this is awesome. This is like we're getting our own personal limnology course this is really nice. And I'll put a some links to some of these terms in our show notes so that you can read about them. And if you want to see our show notes, you can go to teach Great Lakes dot transistor dot F m slash to and check out the show notes and links there. So with the all of these different lakes, we have some that leak out some that are some that flow out into the ocean not leak out. Some that get leaked into while they all get leaked into I guess, at a minimum by the fish. But I have a question though. Maybe you can help since I'm getting a personal limnology lesson. I'm from New Orleans where I was born and raised. And so there we have Lake Pontchartrain, which is not really a lake at all, is it?

Dr. Michael Twiss 17:34
It is. It's a lake. It's a Yep, it was formed by its we call it a coastal lake. It's right on the coast. And it was probably caused by at some time a storm that built up some sediments and essentially prevented a bay or cut off a bay from the ocean and filled up with with with with river water and flows out.

Stuart Carlton 17:58
Oh, interesting, because it's fairly saline we call it brackish. But I mean you can catch trout and stuff like that. Yeah,

Dr. Michael Twiss 18:03
it's it's in between. So it's on its way to becoming a lake unless a storm breaches it. And it'll just become part of the, the coastal Gulf of Mexico.

Stuart Carlton 18:13
Yeah, unfortunately, I think you're meant to say until the storm reaches it, but we'll see.

Dr. Michael Twiss 18:17
It's inevitable, it can either get stronger and create more of a distinct lake or it can just revert back to where originally was, which was part of the Gulf of Mexico coast.

Stuart Carlton 18:29
So the Great Lakes about 10,000 years ago is when if I'm getting this right, the glaciers melted, and they cause the Great Lakes to sort of fill up where the Siberian sea was, is that kind of the short version of the story.

Dr. Michael Twiss 18:42
The Siberian sea deposits make up some features of the Great Lakes, but they were there a lot softer rock than the than the granite that makes up the Canadian Shield, which is the northern portions that are that are exposed, and they were exposed by the actions of the of the of the glaciers. And if you think about a glaciers where where I'm sitting here, the ice was predicted to have been two kilometers or about a mile high. Above my head. Yeah. And so when you when it moves, it really pushes a lot of things around. And so that's a lot of it's a lot of math, and it's moving quite slowly, but it's very effective at crashing rock and moving it around. And all around the Great Lakes. You see that the Scarborough Bluffs beside Toronto are a pile of gravel, rocks and sand that are just left there. And it's a really hazardous place because it's it's still eroding. And because it's unstable because it's just leftovers when the glaciers left and melted the all this rock that was pushed in front. Really good farmland down in the US on the US sides of the Great Lakes. Because a lot of a lot of the soils were pushed down and deposited there. And if you go into To the north shore of Lake Superior Lake Huron, and not to not to mention the harsh weather, the soils are quite thin. And that's a remnant of the, of the glaciation. It hasn't.

Stuart Carlton 20:11
So a lot of our great farmland in this area is because of the Great Lakes, essentially,

Dr. Michael Twiss 20:17
because of the, because of the glacier that the crater. And so after the ice left the region, the land was actually depressed and depressed in the sense of I think, you know, those mattresses where you sit on the mattress and you leave a, you leave an imprint, and then you put your hand away, and then it starts to slowly move back. That's, yeah, that's the same thing that happened here. Except it's in super slow motion. And it's still occurring. And so there's this, we call isostatic rebound. And so the lakes are actually, and the land is moving, and rising at different rates around the Great Lakes basin. And that really affects the water levels a lot, because as I mentioned earlier, the Great Lakes are very shallow. Yeah, so your, your Shoreline can just move up a little bit, and all of a sudden, you've got either more land exposed, and somewhere else, it'll go down and you've got less exposed. So it's quite a, an impact that it's having and still having. So we're kind of we're we were recovering, I guess, from the last glaciation.

Stuart Carlton 21:23
So then going forward, if we project forward 10,000 years, when you and I are sitting back for episode number, at that point, it'll be well into the 50 or 60,000 of this podcast. I'm looking at we're looking at the Great Lakes what what changes will we be talking about then,

Dr. Michael Twiss 21:40
what I think would be really cool is being there when Niagara River eventually roads, the the fall of the road back to Lake Erie. And so what you're going to get there is a lake where the Eastern basin of Lake areas, and Central Basin, Western Mason will just be an extension of the Detroit River. Hmm, yeah.

Stuart Carlton 21:59
That's what's the timeframe on that?

Dr. Michael Twiss 22:02
You can calculate it, but it's slowed down a lot. Because what Canada in the United States do now, is they divert the water from a considerable amount of the water is diverted out of Niagara Falls, oh, sure. To to create hydropower. And so there's just enough water to make it look impressive. And because of that, the rate of erosion has slowed tremendously.

Stuart Carlton 22:35
So I can't let you go without asking about I think what something that might be your favorite part about the Great Lakes, which is they also have a lot of hockey teams. I go. I went to your website, and I think hockey was mentioned on there, at least, I don't know. 26 different times. So in two minutes, I know nothing. Well, actually, here's what I know about hockey for a very little while in New Orleans. They had a minor league hockey team, the New Orleans brass, and I used to sell beer at the New Orleans brass games. And so I sold a lot of beer, but didn't necessarily watch a lot of hockey. And it was minor league hockey anyway. So it was mainly scoring goals and fighting, which, you know, I guess it's part of it. But so what is your 92nd NHL analysis for this year so that we can look back and think about it.

Dr. Michael Twiss 23:24
Wow, that's, that's Thanks. Thanks a lot for the for the opportunity to talk about hockey because Clarkson universities is a big hockey place. But I'll tell you the truth, Stewart, ice skate around 80 games a year and so that's what NHL players skate. Right but I spend most of my time as a as a USA Hockey referee. Oh, really? Yeah. And so my my my side gig on weekends, I'm doing a game tonight. So yeah,

Stuart Carlton 23:54
that's crazy. Hold on, we this is now has to extend a little bit longer. So as a hockey referee, so USA Hockey, what level of what level of hockey is it that you RAF?

Dr. Michael Twiss 24:05
Right now I primarily do midgets and bantams and PVS. And tonight's I got a squirt gun. So ages eight to 18. And I do women's 90 new games. It's all it's all great fun. And, and, you know, fighting is not part of the game. Fighting there's rules against fighting. And so if people even swing, they're out of the game. So it's, we keep a pretty tight ship.

Stuart Carlton 24:31
Yeah. And nobody wants to watch my eight year old throwing down on the hockey.

Dr. Michael Twiss 24:36
Well, some of them tried to do it. But you know, there's they got to learn that there's a different we call standards of play rules. So it's a beautiful game. And it's so fun to watch kids out there. Being really healthy and having a good time. Good sport.

Stuart Carlton 24:51
Yeah, so I was in Texas for a while working for Texas Sea Grant. And there were a significant culture of you know, people are really in Like peewee football, and eight year old football in a way that is very Texas, shall we say? Do you find the same sort of intensity around the young hockey too?

Dr. Michael Twiss 25:12
Yes. Hockey in this region is is very big. So it's pretty intense. We have, you know, the Montreal Canadiens play two hours away from where we are here. The Ottawa Senators play an hour and a half away from us. And so, you know, there's a lot of hockey there always has been traditionally. They've been playing hockey here for since the early 20s. So I guess we're getting up to 100 years of collegiate hockey here at Clarkson.

Stuart Carlton 25:44
Wow. Yeah. Was Clarkson many good or no good.

Dr. Michael Twiss 25:48
The men have never won the the NCAA. However, our women. Since I've been here, they started a team. And they've won the national championship three times. Wow. Yes. And so we're pretty proud of them. They are. They're amazing athletes.

Stuart Carlton 26:04
Yeah, I can imagine. Well, we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.

Dr. Michael Twiss 26:08
Oh, my university would love that. And Carolyn? Carolyn, where are you from?

Carolyn Foley 26:13
I'm from just south of Windsor. So Amherstburg, which you might actually know Amherst.

Dr. Michael Twiss 26:18
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that's the, the, the Griffin actually beats at the Coast Guard base there. Yeah. Emerson.

Carolyn Foley 26:28
Yep. That's, I used to ride my bike down there and just sort of look at it longingly. So. Yeah. And so growing up, we were always it was you either routed for the Red Wings, or the leafs League. I'm on very much on the Red Wings, then. Oh, and I was following them in the mid 90s, when they were really good.

Dr. Michael Twiss 26:49
That's so cool. I moved to Canada in 19 167. And we moved to Quebec City. And then we moved to Northern Ontario, and we got to Northern Ontario. This town is either all Canadians fans, the French people, or you're all leafs, fans, people. And so even though we're Americans, my dad said, Well, we just came from Quebec, so why don't why don't you cheer for the the the Montreal Canadiens and so I ended up hanging around with a totally different crowd. Yeah. It was all good.

Stuart Carlton 27:27
So how did you? I don't know how long we should prolong this, but how did you get into hockey refereeing then, so you must have liked to play right. And enjoy? I mean, you have Yep. Yeah,

Dr. Michael Twiss 27:37
I was, I was a bit of a moron as a as a teenager. Well, I stopped playing in bantams. Because I, I liked to fight. And, and I did that. And, but other guys are bigger than me. And so you know, that's, that's I kind of stopped doing it then. Because it was just, it's just wrong. And then see, I started playing again at Trent University. And that was intense because it was intramural, but it was contact hockey. It was body checking. And then I moved down here and folks here playing like Monday nights, the faculty. And so they got into it. And then one day someone asked me to help out with refereeing a an ROTC game, Army versus Air Force here on campus. And I said I could Rafik cannot escape. So I did. And I got hooked. And I'm in my seventh year now. And it was really awkward when I first started because, you know, it's an older person and your referee people think, Oh, you're experienced, but there's a lot to learn and how to referee and how to control. People manage the game. No other rules. But primarily, it's just keep it safe. If you if you do a sport, you should consider being a referee, referee revenue, because you get I get results for

Stuart Carlton 28:58
Coach. My daughter's softball team and yeah, I was in a non competitive league. And, you know, I would like to point out that we won every game. But I don't think it's not humble to point out the truth, which is that we want every game in our non competitive league. You know, you don't need to be it's not it's just the way it is. For everyone. Facts are facts. But, but I found that the biggest I mean, we actually did run into in this non competitive league one parent issue. Oh, yeah. Yeah, you know, and it's like, holy moly. Because, yeah, people take things seriously. So, so bringing this back, let's bring it all the way back around to our raison vetra. That's French for those of you in Canada, with the Great Lakes. Here's the real reason I brought you on what would it take to freeze a great lake thick enough that we could play hockey on? That is the real question.

Dr. Michael Twiss 29:58
That's a lot of lots of Heat. I know a lot of you have a buddy of mine, Mike McKay at, at the University of Windsor worked with folks from the US Coast Guard. And they actually got out and skated around on Lake Erie. Okay, okay, you're not. That's great. And I might mention that every year. Since 2005, we have been playing a fundraising hockey game at the International Association for Great Lakes research. Yep, I'm the commissioner. I started at all and, and we raise up 10s of dollars every year, actually, hundreds of dollars, I should say. And so we play hockey. It's Canada Vs. USA. And it's, it's fun to do. And so we played him. We played in, we played in Detroit. We played in Toledo, Toronto. Hamilton, Peterborough. Yep. Okay. All right.

Stuart Carlton 30:57
What do you all raise money for? Is it for Agler itself? Or is it for a charity, a different charity, or it's all

Dr. Michael Twiss 31:03
for the Agler scholarship, because a number of us have benefited from the Agler scholarship. And so we're trying to give money back to the, to the association to support other students who wants to study the Great Lakes.

Stuart Carlton 31:14
That's awesome. Sounds like a really fascinating field. And we really appreciate you taking a few minutes to teach us about this. Now, if people are interested in learning more, they can go to your web page, which I will link to in the show notes. And I believe you're also on Twitter. Is that right? Do you have a Twitter handle that you'd like to share?

Dr. Michael Twiss 31:30
Yes, I do. It's at M twist,

Stuart Carlton 31:33
at M twist. And we'll also link to that in our show notes, which again, are at Teach Great Lakes dot transistor dot F m slash two, because this is episode number two. Well, Dr. Michael twist, thank you so much for taking a few minutes to teach us about the Great Lakes.

Dr. Michael Twiss 31:49
Oh, you're welcome, Stuart. And it's been nice talking with you and Carolyn today about the Great Lakes.

Stuart Carlton 31:56
Well, that was a really interesting interview. Carolyn, what's something that you learned about the Great Lakes today,

Carolyn Foley 32:00
I learned that there's evidence that caribou hunting took place on one of the reefs out in the Great Lakes. And that is just brilliant, brilliant, how much you spend

Stuart Carlton 32:11
early on. It's really on brand of you to have learned that and to have loved how how brilliant that is. I learned that the Great Lakes are like 10,000 years old had no idea absolutely no idea. So that, to me, is pretty interesting stuff. Thank you so much for tuning in to teach me about the Great Lakes. We'll be back again next month with a new episode. In the meantime, I encourage you to check out Sea Grant at AI sea grant.org Feel free to follow the Sea Grant Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant on twitter@twitter.com slash i l i n Sea Grant for Illinois-Indiana. Sea Grant. And you can follow the show to Twitter at Teach Me nope at Teach Great Lakes. Sorry, I just made the count like yesterday. And so I'm still learning this stuff anyway, at Teach Great Lakes. And if you have questions, there is no question too stupid for this podcast. Because I promise you nobody knows less about the Great Lakes than I do at least right now. When Michael and I are back here and 50,000 years I'll know a lot but until then, we'll see you next time. Thank you