Water

VIDEO: Great Lakes Beer Tour

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Remember how we told you that the Great Lakes brews great beers? Echo writers knew we weren’t alone in our fascination with the region’s ales, lagers, malts and stouts. But we weren’t so savvy to propose and film a TV show about them, which is what producer Matt Renner and host Amy Sherman have done. The “Great American Brew Trail” will showcase Great Lakes breweries – about 80 percent of them in Michigan – when it premiers on PBS stations this fall. Beers in other regions will follow.

Echo

VIDEO: Six-pack trout

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A University of Rhode Island scientist may have developed a way to solve the impending Asian carp crisis in the Great Lakes: Pump up the natives. Check out this University of Rhode Island video. Read more here.

Echo

VIDEO: Organic chickens are free to roam

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Chickens are free to roam the student organic farm at Michigan State University.

Unlike confined chickens, free-range chickens interact with with plants and other creatures for the good of the farm system.

See video.

Echo

VIDEO: The Undead: Lightfoot and lazy journalism

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When I joined the Great Lakes Echo reporting staff as a recent Michigan transplant, my coworkers commonly derided me for a number of regional faux pas that were a product of my casual Great Plains parlance. They ranged from adding an “ACK” to Mackinac Island to pronouncing “Sault Ste. Marie” as something you may eat for dinner. But my ignorance of Gordon Lightfoot’s classic, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” – a song about the actual shipwreck in 1975 that left 29 bodies missing in Lake Superior – just made these natives angry. So after having listened to the song enough to inject some of Lightfoot’s drawl into my bone marrow, I’m sure I’m not the only one whose heart sunk like the Big Fitz last Thursday when social networking sites became abuzz with reports of the singer’s sudden death.

Echo

VIDEO: Ice, ice baby

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The ice is back, and it’s filling the newsites and blogosphere with echoes of the 1980s.   Happily it has nothing to do with a certain rapper. No, the St. Clair River is once again stoppered by a miles-long ice jam.  The last time the river was this backed up was 1984.  That ice jam was 20 miles long and blocked the passage for 24 days.  It was recently eyed as one of the causes for Lake Huron’s falling water levels. The new ice jam is considerably shorter (a measly 9 miles) and the ice cutters are already racing to the rescue.  Still, ice jams can damage a river bed in a relatively short period of time.  The river water forced under the ice cover is moving fast. Remember when you were a kid playing with the garden hose and you covered half the opening with your thumb and then chased your siblings around with the super-powered water spout?  Yeah.  It’s something like that.  Only instead of terrorizing children, the water is scraping the river bottom clean of sediment and generally messing things up.

Echo

VIDEO: Next best thing to an actual Great Lake? Try a virtual one

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Under the category “Cool Things on the Web”, I’d like to file the Great Lakes virtual tour by NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory. The tour uses a Google Earth plugin and narration to navigate the Lakes.  My favorite part of the tour is the Lake Huron sinkholes by the Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary. I wrote a series of articles on the sinkholes last summer, and am always pleased to give them a shout out. The tour works fine online, but if you have Google Earth on your computer you can download the tour and make better use of some of its features.  This is particularly handy if you want to watch some of the accompanying videos or check out photos.  Otherwise, the site lists the videos below the plugin, so you can watch them on YouTube. This is a great site for a refresher on some of the more interesting geologic and historical features around the Lakes.  At a little more than 13 minutes it might seem like a long commitment (especially by Web standards), but I think you’ll enjoy it.  You might even learn something new about our Lakes.

Echo
Lake Superior clouds

VIDEO: Spaced-out views of Great Lakes weather

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The Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies — a joint effort between UW-Madison, NOAA and NASA — runs a blog featuring posts of weather-related satellite imagery. The posts often include beefy animated images of things like volcanoes in the West Indies and potential vorticity anomalies on the California coast. Luckily, the institute’s Wisconsin bias sometimes shows through and they offer up cool Great Lakes scenes. In December, they put together this mesmerizing shot of cloud bands streaming over Lake Superior. Photo: University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center
Be sure to let the whole image load and start looping, which could take a few minutes.