Every Day Is Special: lakes

Showing posts with label lakes. Show all posts

May 11 – Minnesota's Statehood Day

Posted on May 11, 2016

The name Minnesota means “clear blue water” in the Dakota language.

Minnesota's nickname is “Land of 10,000 Lakes.”

So, I bet you know what I am going to feature on the anniversary of Minnesota becoming the 32^nd state of the United States (on this date in 1858)....

Minnesota's lakes!

So...does Minnesota REALLY have 10,000 lakes? Or is that an exaggeration?

Actually, that's an understatement! There are actually 11,842 lakes of more than ten acres in size!

Because of the sheer number of lakes, there are many repeat names. For example, there are 2 Alice Lakes, 2 Anderson Lakes, 2 Andrew Lakes, 2 Anna Lakes, 4 Ann Lakes, and a whopping 7 Augusta Lakes! (And that's just the repeats for the letter “A”!)

Here's where it gets bad: according to 50 States, Minnesota has 201 different Mud Lakes, 154 Long Lakes, and 123 Rice Lakes!

To see a list of Minnesota's lakes, check out Wikipedia.

Here are some cool things about Minnesota's waters:

Minnesota's waters flow in various directions. Some rivers flow north to Hudson Bay, in Canada; some flow east to the Atlantic Ocean; and some flow south to the Gulf of Mexico.

(I hope it doesn't surprise you to learn that all of Minnesota's rivers flow DOWNwards.)

Voyageurs National Park is the largest water-based park in the National Park System.

Lake Superior, which touches on Minnesota as well as other states and Canada, is the largest of the Great Lakes and, as a matter of fact, the largest freshwater lake in North America. It is the third largest freshwater lake in the world (by surface area).

Lake Superior is so large, it looks a lot like an ocean.

The total surface water area in Minnesota, including both deep water and wetlands, is more than 13 million acres. That's enough surface water area to cover all of Connecticut and Rhode Island, together!

This is one reason people like lakes: They love to fish!!

Me? I tend to be way more excited about their beauty than their bounty.

Also on this date:

Twilight Zone Day

Physicist Richard Feynman's birthday

Choreographer Martha Graham's birthday

Birthday of the first known “Siamese twins”

Songwriter Irving Berlin's birthday

Anniversary of the first printed book (maybe)

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

June 7 – Anniversary of the End of a Manitoba Voyage

Posted on June 7, 2015

Do you know what the “mouth” of a river is?

It's one end of the river – the end that is “downstream” – the part where the river flows into a lake, reservoir, ocean, or maybe just another river.

That is the opposite end from the “headwaters,” the source of the river, which is often an underground stream or a melting glacier but is sometimes a lake or a marsh.

On this date in 1800, famed explorer David Thompson reached the mouth of the Saskatchewan River, in what is now Manitoba, Canada. The river empties into Lake Winnipeg.

Many Americans don't know much about Canada, especially the central provinces of Saskatchewan and Manitoba. These two provinces are largely prairie, and of course a few lakes.

And when I say “a few lakes,” I mean over 110,000 lakes in Manitoba alone, including the tenth-largest freshwater lake in the entire world, Lake Winnipeg.

I don't know if you noticed that I referred to David Thompson as a “famed” explorer. He is widely known by Canadians, but not so much by citizens of the U.S. Thompson surveyed huge swaths of land and traveled miles of rivers; he filled in gaps of knowledge about almost two million square miles of Canada!

This map shows Thompson's exploratory routes.

Here are some cool things to see in Manitoba:

The Canadian Museum for Human Rights has interactive exhibits and a Tower of Hope.

The interior of the Manitoba legislative building features hieroglyphics, free-masonic symbols, and numeric codes – but in a pretty subtle way. A tour guide is helpful to point out such things as a bust of Medusa, the repeated use of the numbers “666” and “13,” and Egyptian sphinxes!

Lake Winnipeg (above)

and Hudson Bay (below)

Check out the beautiful Manitoba lake below. There seems to be a mysterious "hole" in the lake.

Also on this date:

Artist Paul Gauguin's birthday

Boone Day

Poet Gwendolyn Brooks's birthday

Birthday of men's fashion icon Beau Brummell

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

February 2 – Happy Birthday, François-Alphonse Forel

Posted on February 2, 2015

One thing is for sure – our birthday boy, François-Alphonse Forel, did NOT grow up hoping to become a limnologist. As a matter of fact, when he was growing up, there was no such thing as limnology!

Because this Swiss scientist, born on this date in 1841, grew up to invent limnology!

I bet you've never heard of this science before, but it's simply the study of lakes.

Lake Geneva

Forel was born and raised in a town on the shores of Lake Geneva. He worked as a professor of medicine at a university on that same lake. I imagine he was good at his job...

But what he really loved was the lake!

So he ended up investigating the biology of the lake. The chemistry of the lake. The circulation of water in the lake, and the sedimentation (how particles of dirt and sand that are suspended in water settle to the lake bottom) of the lake. Most important, having studied all sorts of physical and life science aspects to the lake, the studied the interrelation of all these things. How did water circulation affect living creatures? How did circulation affect the chemistry of the lake, and the sedimentation process? Forel studied these and many other relationships between living and non-living parts of a lake environment.

Lake Superior, arguably the
largest lake in the world.

He discovered that there were currents of water with different density in Lake Geneva (and, it turns out, all lakes). Sometimes water has different density because it has different temperatures—in other words, cold water flowing into a lake from an ice pack is more dense than the warmer water already in the lake.

Forel also discovered and named seiches, the standing waves that typically occur in lakes and other enclosed or partially enclosed bodies of water.

This is one of my favorite lakes, Crater Lake in Oregon.

Finally, Forel developed the Forel-Ule scale (with another scientist) to evaluated the color of a lake or other body of water. Above is Moraine Lake in Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada. I think it has some of the most beautiful colored water I've ever seen!

Also on this date: