The Great Lakes Association of Science Ships has a new way of tracking U.S. and Canadian vessels researching the sweetwater seas.

There are about 100 such vessels.

The association’s ship locator is meant to help researchers collaborate and more efficiently use the vessels.

This image comes from Lauren Jorgensen a petty officer in the U.S. Coast Guard. Heading towards Cleveland, The Cutter Neah Bay breaks through ice on Lake Erie.
To submit an image for consideration for Great Lakes Echo’s Photo Friday feature, send the image, a caption and your name to greatlakesecho@gmail.com. Put Photo Friday in the subject line.

Chicago Mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel refers to the Great Lakes as “our Grand Canyon.”
If he’s serious, he’ll fight carp, sewage and mercury. Water made Chicago and the mayor can improve the city’s relationship with it.

Raise your secchi disks and get out the thermistor—it’s lake monitoring season and you can be the scientist.
The Michigan Clean Water Corps is recruiting  volunteers to monitor the quality of the state’s inland lakes.
Secchi disks gauge water clarity—a major lake health indicator. Thermistors measure water temperature. Volunteers also sample native and exotic aquatic plants at different depths, measure dissolved oxygen and collect algae and water samples for chlorophyll and phosphorus tests.
The organization’s Cooperative Lakes Monitoring Program is the second oldest volunteer monitoring program in the country and has operated for …

Climate change impacts songbird breeding and distribution patterns and could potentially lead to health problems in birds. Birds now migrate north earlier and south later. They might also arrive too early or too late to feed on hatching insects due to changes in climate.

About 25 percent to 29 percent of adults in the Great Lakes region are obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics. Playing with their potatoes might just be what the doctor ordered.

The Great Lakes SmackDown! is back with some mean, green, terrestrial fighting machines! The land brawls start March 14!

Protecting northern Michigan streams from a controversial method of gas development will take some watchdogging, according to Anglers of the Au Sable.

To combat ice sheets on the Ottawa River in Canada, you might say explosives are this team’s dynamite.
Ice builds up on a 9-kilometer stretch of the Ottawa River each winter, creating an icy problem should water swell behind an ice jam and flood any of the 900 buildings nearby.
A quick remedy—dynamite.

“Ice blasting” started in the 1880s according to a BBC article. By the 1960s and 1970s, the explosive practice became an annual flood prevention measure.
Since mid-February teams have used buzz saws and amphibious ice breakers to carve channels in the …