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Photo Friday: Michigan Balloonfest lights up the night

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The recent 28th annual Michigan Challenge Balloonfest  in Howell, Mich., provided a fun-filled weekend for attendees to play games, watch fireworks and enjoy the launch of several hot air balloons! The hot air balloon ‘glow’, in which pilots and their crew gather in the Landing Zone and fire up their balloons as darkness falls is a highlight of the Michigan Challenge Balloonfest. With 44 participants this year, the “glow” featured more than a dozen balloonists and their crew during the glow.  

 

 

 

The crew of the Sullair balloon, piloted by Shawn Raya, of Oxford, Michigan, launches the balloon for the “glow”.  

Above, Airwaves One (WHMI), PNC Bank, Michigan CAT, SullAir and “Andy”, sponsored by Paulsen’s Construction, show their colors.

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Flash Point: Mark Schacter captures Cuyahoga River ruin and redemption

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We asked Great Lakes photographers to send us favorite challenging Great Lakes shots and the story behind making them. Mark Schacter sent this photo and story. My challenge: how to capture in a single photograph a story of environmental ruin and redemption on Lake Erie? The subject was the Cuyahoga River, which rises in the northeast corner of Ohio and follows a 140 km U-shaped path before emptying into Lake Erie at Cleveland. One day in 1969 an oil slick on its surface caught fire in Cleveland. Although this was not the first time the filthy Cuyahoga had burned, Time magazine seized on the 1969 fire as emblematic of the devastating effects of water pollution in the US.

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Photo Friday: The gulls of Lake Erie

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On the shores of Lake Erie near Cleveland, Ohio, adjacent to an industrial area housing the Cleveland Browns Stadium, the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame, and the Great Lakes Science Center, is home to a large colony of ring-billed gulls. The gulls build their nests on the ground and line it with grass, reeds and rushes and typically hatch 2-4 eggs at a time. Mom and Dad share the sitting duties. These photos show the colony, the nest sitters, a nest and the “guards” who line the fence to warn the parents-to-be of impending intruders.  

 

 

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NASA satellite shows Great Lakes region hit hard by drought

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NASA’s Earth Observatory has a remarkable view of the impact of the summer drought. Parts of the Great Lakes region are among those hardest hit. The image depicts plant health in the central U.S. with data collected by the space agency’s Terra satellite. Brown areas show where plants have taken a hit, cream indicates normal growth  and green indicates lush vegetation.  Gray indicates where data could not be collected because of snow or cloud cover. Things look particularly bad in southern Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois.

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It’s 11:55 p.m.; Do you know where your Asian carp are?

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Longtime environment writer Jeff Alexander just launched a nifty feature to track the Asian carp crisis. It’s modeled after the Doomsday Clock that scientists created in the 1940s to track how the world inched toward nuclear holocaust. The Asian Carp Doomsday Clock features hands made of images of bighead and silver carp – two of the species biologists and others fear could devastate the Great Lakes ecosystem. Jeff does a nice round up of a week’s worth of bad news along the carp Maginot Line to justify setting the hands at a mere five minutes before midnight. When the original Doomsday Clock was launched in 1947, it was set at seven minutes to midnight.