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Stuart Carlton 0:00
teach me about the Great Lakes. Teach me about the Great Lakes John, welcome back to teach me about Great Lakes a twice monthly podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice get people who are smarter and harder working 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 I'm joined this week by my good friend Carolyn Foley. Hello, Carolyn, how are you?

Carolyn Foley 0:23
Hello, Stuart. I'm doing pretty okay. Thank you. How are you doing today?

Stuart Carlton 0:28
I'm also pretty okay. pretty okay. To mostly okay to maybe somewhat okay. Yeah.

Carolyn Foley 0:35
Yeah, one of one of our co workers. And I had a conversation earlier today about how if you ask a certain group of people, you know, if you say how's it going? And they respond with? Well, you know, I'm here that actually means, like, much, much worse than what it's so I'm not here, I'm maybe three steps above. You're

Stuart Carlton 0:52
above here. That's good. Presence is important. It is but no, I used to I used to always be honest, when people ask me that, because let's be you know, things are usually not that great. You know, it's all in a downward spiral towards the end here. And so then I used to be well, it for always, also no hooks, you know, but then I was honest, for a long time. And then I learned you really can't be honest to that question. So you have to be three steps above honest I guess, in your case.

Carolyn Foley 1:18
Exactly. Yes. Anyway,

Stuart Carlton 1:20
today, we're going to speak today with Maria Detroit's who is a professor at the University of Toronto, she and a whole bunch of co authors wrote a paper on like, Great are large lake, not Great Lakes, although there are great lakes in there, largely degradation kind of globally. And they looked at some of what's going on and set up a framework for thinking and worry about that. And so since one of the main things we love to do, is stress about environmental problems on this podcast, we're gonna go ahead and do that. So let's, the good news is she is a researcher. So let's go ahead and hit the researcher feature theme, and we'll talk with Maria.

Researcher with researcher teaches about third grade. Our guest today is Dr. Maria Dietrich. She's an associate professor of biogeochemistry, in the department of physical and environmental sciences in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Toronto. Maria, how are you today?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 2:26
Great. Thank you.

Stuart Carlton 2:27
Thank you so much for coming on. We appreciate you. Joining us to talk about this interesting work that you do. So first of all, let's start with a real big picture. What is biochemistry? Exactly? What is it that you do?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 2:39
It's actually by Joe chemistry. And you can imagine that I'm interested in any interaction and understanding interaction between life and our Earth. So for example, if we'll look into the lake, we want to understand cycling of any element for example, nutrients. And if we take phosphorus, this cycle can be driven by many chemical reactions. But for many cases, the reaction will be triggered by organisms, even by micro organisms. So one very, very simple example, we're looking at the processes at the bottom of the lake, right, of course, it's a lot of mud. And it's nice to play with. But you can imagine a lot of micro organisms working there and doing the job to release our phosphorus or nutrients. So to work on this, we are talking about the subject of biochar, geo chemistry, we need biology. We also interested in the geological background, but we also need chemistry because it's a lot of chemistry going on. So I'm biogeochemist.

Stuart Carlton 3:59
So that was gonna be like, That must give you like a really interesting perspective on, you know what exactly it is that drives all of the stuff happening in the Great Lakes. That is interesting. And so one of the reasons we invited you on today is that you recently with a bunch of colleagues, a whole bunch of colleagues published a paper called I'm gonna get the title right, scientists warning to humanity, rapid degradation of the world's large lakes. And so I saw this paper and I was a little bit concerned, I'll be honest, because I don't like it when scientists are warning me but let's let's sort of think about it. What is a large lake sort of in the way that you're talking about it and why are they important?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 4:41
I actually like your action you should be actually concern and this paper is that is the main task of this paper. We want to warn our humanity about our large lakes, what is the large lakes that was our first point of discussion? The first definition was actually in 1982. And the large lakes were defined by any inland waters great or than 500 square kilometres in our paper was selected and consider all the lake are which are larger than 100 kilometres.

Stuart Carlton 5:22
So smaller large lakes and the original definition was that just you had to pick a point or what? How did you arrive at 100? square kilometers, right. And in surface area?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 5:35
Yes, because we were looking into their main or impact of this lake and also the geographical distribution, it will look on all the lakes we selected, there actually account for almost 90% of the total surface area and volume of the walls, lakes. So you can imagine they are really crucial, they're really important. You can just look and our Great Lakes were sitting off. And if we're, look how many people actually live there, it's almost 50 Millions. And it just like one system of the Leche League, if we look in Japan, and Lake Beaver, Lake Beaver, for example, provides drinking water for almost 15 million people. So these are those were like criteria, why we actually limited our paper for the legs larger than 100.

Stuart Carlton 6:41
Although for getting 90% of the surface area volume, that's not it's not that limited, is it?

Unknown Speaker 6:48
Exactly.

Stuart Carlton 6:49
And so, so so these are important because they contain a lot of water. About 90% or so. And now because

Carolyn Foley 6:57
so just sorry, if I can This is Carolyn, if I could just step in for a second. Are they all freshwater lakes? Or are some of them saltwater?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 7:05
They are all different lakes. And of course the some of them are salt lakes, they, we we also consider the diversity of the large lakes, some of them salt lakes. And as you know, maybe they're the biggest in in a water is Caspian Sea, which is solid. But what is also important for us to to cover the diversity in the world and to cover this job. geographical diversity, this different salinity or the different by otter and still being like yes, yeah. Right.

Stuart Carlton 7:46
So so obviously, when you're looking at all these different lakes, it's hard to give a pat answer to this. But but so this is about the degradation of the large lakes like what is, you know, what is causing degradation to these lakes? Like, is it I mean, I assume it's primarily humans. But But what are the types of degradations that you're seeing? Or that you're concerned about? I guess,

Dr. Maria Dietrich 8:06
they degredation is actually this is very good question. The degradation can happen on different way. It could be physical, it could be chemical, it could be biological degradation. And

Stuart Carlton 8:20
you're perfect. It's a biogeochemist.

Dr. Maria Dietrich 8:23
That's why we're doing that. And if it will look into the degradation and we're asking the question, why largely are actually very sensitive, you can imagine those slake have a huge surface area. And of course, if you have review later on a kava has a huge surface area, it would be very sensitive to climate, it's of operation as our water temperature, its impact of precipitation, just talking about meteorological and climate condition. But we talk about huge population and ecological services as habitat for us or for people. So we have a huge population. So they are the source of degradation is anthropogenic impact. Of course, we're changing land use, of course, we're using the water for our purposes. And this is all impacting this huge lakes. And results in degradation. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 9:28
so So that's something I didn't expect, but the actual surface area makes the lake more vulnerable to climate stressors in some ways is that because it interacts with the air more, I suppose is what it is,

Dr. Maria Dietrich 9:39
of course, it just imagine or it has been shown even it's like there was some discussion about that that larger lake like Lake Superior Lake Michigan, they're actually changing that temperature rapidly than a small lake like Lake Erie. And if you imagine lakes Superior, which has been under ice cover for a long period of time, as it is now, it will impact the whole food chain, the lake is not as long under the ice cover, it means it will be easily warming up in in their spring it will be earlier, it's dangerous for called species, very treasures called species like fish called species, maybe they cannot survive, it will be also impacting algae, and so on. Because it's a huge surface area. And it's impacting if you look on the other side to Lake Erie, their water temperature has not been changed as fast as in the Lake Superior in Lake Michigan.

Stuart Carlton 10:49
And that's at least partially because of the surface area difference. That's totally counterintuitive. Because you think it has you know the larger volume of water or provide like ballast, but I guess not. So we're looking at, you know, the degradation was, of course, the it's anthropogenic, its climate, which is anthropogenic, of course. And it's changing in inputs. And so that leads me this idea that your paper is called a warning, though. So can you explain to us why you decided like, Oh, we're gonna have a warning to humanity. And it looked like you said, this is the second warning. And there's a framework like can you talk a little bit about the warning and the framework and how that how we can think about the lakes, I guess as a result of that,

Dr. Maria Dietrich 11:29
there's actually long history of scientists warning, I think it started in even in 90s, the scientists started warning to humanity and different aspects, which is our kind of trying to find the dialogue between our society and scientists, and our

Stuart Carlton 11:50
paper, oops, I'll have to look

Dr. Maria Dietrich 11:54
at our paper, as the main target was to provide a framework that we can actually access all the dangers of, of their incriminating of the large lakes, what we actually thinking all the large lakes are actually healthy, looks beautiful, and it's not as as bad as small. And that why this paper actually, that's how this paper has been written. It's a product of North American and European collaboration on one small workshop where we're starting saying, My God, we, we see a lot of changes. And what is great in the Great Lakes, there is a long history of monitoring, very long history of monitoring. So our research based on solid data, so we can actually provide a long history and we can see, and that there is a huge degradation, we can look into the long sediment course that archives of history, there are highlights of history of land use changes of environmental pollution. And, and we can actually combine us with their water quality data.

Carolyn Foley 13:21
And so the what types of organizations are gathering those long term datasets that you're referring to, are there particular organizations that you rely on?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 13:31
There are several organization and we actually, there is in the papers, so we we can't count them, all them the Great Lake observatories, for example, for North American lakes, there is Environment Canada, their organization in the States, it's nor so it's it's very, very, very long list of different organizations. There were a lot of growing zation in Europe, so your your saw data on European lakes, the data goes back to 1920s and even 1800 Something in Switzerland. So yeah, yeah, there are there are many things God and many organization which can governmental and governmental organization, mainly who can provide the data.

Carolyn Foley 14:29
So it is typically, even in other parts of the world is typically a government organization that maintains this long term. Yeah, that's really important. Cool. So I had one other question about the, in terms of the the, the degradation that you've been talking about, through the paper, are there a couple that were sort of consistent across the entire world rather than localized like what are the threats bits that are kind of consistent everywhere or are there none that are consistent everywhere?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 15:05
This is very good question. So, we will look into the different and that was one of the main point why we were looking in North America and your opinion lakes. And for example, the climate and impact of climate, this the cause of degradation of the lake, it goes through through all the different lakes. Eutrophication are based on. Increase of nutrients in pack and land use, of course, are those are degredation, which can be observed in in lakes in North America and Europe are nowadays are we have microplastics, which is a hot topic, and it goes to Arctic. So we can, we can even find it in the Arctic. And just very recent paper came from, from University of Toronto, where they were investigating micro plastic are from washing blue jeans. And they found that even in sediments in Arctic, so like you can, and this is exactly so what we can do what we can do even once we're washing here, our blue jeans, this is very typical micro phasers. So micro phase a way you can find them back in Arctic. So it's it's going through, of course, there is some typical typical degradation if you have a mining site close to the light Lake. Or if you're if you have different organic contaminants or heavy metals. Yeah, that's what we also have in our here, for example, in Detroit or Hamilton harbors, so we have a huge pollution from steel industry. It's very typical. So it's just because we have steel industry here in Hamilton Harbor. And we see that in the sediment a lot of iron. Yeah, yeah, that's can be typical and can be globally.

Stuart Carlton 17:29
I encourage listeners who are interested in more microplastics this has actually come up a couple of times before. So why don't you go to teach me about the great lakes.com/one The number one to hear our very first episode, or we talked with Sarah Zach about microplastics. Or if you want to go to teach me about the Great Lakes that calm slash 15 Number one, five, we speak with Dr. Lorena Rios Mendoza about the chemistry of microplastics. Lots of garbage. So that is an issue that's come up over and over and over again. And I guess I'm not surprised, but I am dismayed to hear you mentioned it here. And I

Carolyn Foley 17:59
think it is a really good job of illustrating how you know, everything we're doing can affect what's happening. Oh,

Dr. Maria Dietrich 18:06
exactly. Well connected. Yeah.

Stuart Carlton 18:08
But it's such a challenge, though. Because it's easy to be like, oh, yeah, we a bubble. But But I mean, you're talking about industry and jobs. And I'm wearing jeans as we speak. I'm glad to say I wore pants to work this week. But you know, and I will watch these sometime in the next several months. And so it's just it's hard, isn't it?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 18:26
Yeah, that's, you don't know where where you can where you can go? It's everywhere. Yeah.

Carolyn Foley 18:33
Well, you make some recommendations in the paper, though, about things that people can try to do to help with the degradation. Do you mind talking a little bit about some of those? And I know, you mentioned that this list isn't exhaustive, but the fact that you pulled them together? Oh, also, incidentally, this paper is open access. So we'll leave a link for this one in the show notes. For this note as

Stuart Carlton 18:54
well, one of the things we could have a look and we're not supposed to advocate so I'm not going to advocate but open access. Publishing is awesome. Love it.

Carolyn Foley 19:03
Yeah. But yeah. So but yeah, back to the question, what are some of the recommendations that you make for people who want to help with some of the degradation

Dr. Maria Dietrich 19:11
of course, there is as as we all know, in life, there is some small steps, some middle and some large steps are what what we can do and you will start with the small steps and we were just talking about the microplastic and I would say the small step of course is to use as as less as possible plastic and going further, I would say to use as less as possible producing waste. And of course, this is kind of more on passive side. On the active side. There is a lot of stewardship especially in in Great Lakes area. What I know we have A lot of community beach cleaning or stewardship, to collect the water samples in Lake Ontario, I'm participating in collecting water samples during the massive rain because during the rain, we know a lot of erosion happening, a lot of pollutants coming in. And sometimes monitoring is not working during the precipitation event. So just a participate there are, of course, active participation in in the decision making and policymaking. And the big, big step, as mitigation of climate change and looking how we're dealing with energy consumption, what is our carbon footprint are we're traveling a lot, we're using co2 or so and so on. I think it's a lot what we can do on all their spectra of the consumers. Yeah, so it's a lot of stuff we can impact and improve the water quality,

Carolyn Foley 21:11
right. And I just want to double back on a point you just made about how sometimes because you have these great long term datasets, but they are also well organized well ahead of time that sampling in place x will happen at time. Why? Because we have to go to all of these other places. So having those opportunities if you have a group that can go out like right after a big rain event, or we've talked about that in Lake Michigan, too, that there are these huge plumes that come out. Like how can we mobilize? Like, can we use drones or things like that, to have a look at what's happening? So if community based organizations can

Stuart Carlton 21:47
Yeah, that was a huge effort after Hurricane Harvey I lived in the Galveston Bay Area for that. And you know, one of the big things we did with the Gulf isn't Bay, Galveston Bay estuary program was organized sampling for just those reasons to see CL stuff change there.

Dr. Maria Dietrich 22:02
Yes, yes. Yeah.

Stuart Carlton 22:05
And then I'd be remiss if I didn't plug also the corporate of science and monitoring initiative, which is something that Sea Grant and who else the EPA and Canada are all involved in?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 22:18
Yeah, it's great lake protection action remediation plans and it's a lot of it's a lot of our actually grants for so called area of concerns on both sides for for us and also for for Canada. Yeah.

Carolyn Foley 22:37
Do they have similar similar setups in other parts of the world to on large lakes? Do they have Yes, kind of?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 22:44
Yes, they they have pretty similar in many cases, large lakes are also like border. For example, Lake Geneva is border Switzerland and France, Lake Constance, where we have a lot of example, and the paper is a border Lake between Germany and Switzerland, Lago Majora between Switzerland and Italy, in many cases, the ability roll agreement, not in many, in all cases, the ability agreement on the water quality on monitoring. And there are special funds special I know from from Germany, Switzerland and Italy, there is even special funds for boarding water in the European Union Framework Program. Yes, yes.

Carolyn Foley 23:32
So I wanted to ask one more question about kind of how this paper developed. So if you look at it, we mentioned at the beginning that there are a lot of co authors. And this is part of a special issue of the journal Great Lakes research that was focused on a particular conference, I think so can you talk just a little bit about what it's like to create a paper like this and work with so many people I

Dr. Maria Dietrich 23:56
should say it was a wonderful experience, and are mainly driven by John Philip and our land their first two quarters. And it was amazing. It was a pretty small first conference between our II Agler it's our international association of Great Lakes research and large lakes organization from Europe. It was the first conference and was not so many people around 100 and our we were just sitting and asking questions and at one point it was like one session not so many people and one point someone say okay, why? Why we're not coming all together and we'll write one paper so we have so many data and we're working in so many lakes, but we have this many cases we have similar problem. And actually wrong Phillip and all lenders started this they divide At first, we had a discussion over emails, what would be the topic, and then divided in in main topics, and two or three people were writing one session on like one degredation topic or introduction, putting the literature. And actually, I was thinking it will be forever, but it was pretty, very, very effective. It was great. Yeah, it was great leadership of John Philippe and our lands that they kind of put us all together and giving us a deadline and say, Okay, you have to finish this. And each of us, two or three, I was was a team of two other people. And we were writing and discussing our small part. And then we were discussing the big picture and so on. And it was several iteration, but it was it was great.

Stuart Carlton 26:02
Focusing power of a hard deadline, I think is

Dr. Maria Dietrich 26:05
exactly, exactly. And so it's

Carolyn Foley 26:09
also the value. I mean, and this is another thing that we've heard a couple of times through these podcasts, but value of getting people together in the room to start to think about, okay, we're all working similarly in other places, how can we work together? This is really cool.

Dr. Maria Dietrich 26:24
is amazing. Because you, you you feel this energy, you know, like, you feel the energy and expertise and you start working with people. It's just great experience. Yeah. Yeah.

Stuart Carlton 26:36
That sounds great. Well, Maria, this is really interesting. But that's actually not why we invited you here on teach me about Great Lakes. We invited you here on teach me about the Great Lakes to ask you two questions. And the first one is this. If you could choose to have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch? Which one would you choose?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 26:54
Ah, that's a hard one. So that's a hard one, sir. But I should say I would I would go with a lunch. I was going to lunch and maybe a couple of nice people. Yeah, you have this great sandwich.

Stuart Carlton 27:10
Okay, good. So when I'm in Toronto, where do I go to get a great sandwich?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 27:15
I was there is I leave the beaches, which is which is great, which is great area. And there are several several good places and one of my favorite is actually bagel on fire. So this is a nice bagels on fire. And they like they're doing great job with sandwiches.

Stuart Carlton 27:38
Wonderful. Well, I can't wait to go for a sandwich a bagel on fire. Great. And the second question is this we'd like to leave our readers with your readers. We don't actually have any readers. We'd like to leave our listeners with one well we do have trends. Let me start this whole deal over we'd like to leave our listeners with one piece of life advice you know something they can take home with them it can be big and good little serious or silly whatever what's one piece of solid life advice that you have

Dr. Maria Dietrich 28:07
it's hard to lose a silly one I have to think a lot one weekend thinking is just never give up. Yeah, I think that is their their advice I follow and follow I think that is the best one.

Stuart Carlton 28:27
That is really wonderful advice. Well Maria Detroit's if people want to find out more about you or your work, where can they go?

Dr. Maria Dietrich 28:35
The best is my Of course my homepage, or also my Twitter's are in posting. They are all our news and some my my own opinion on what is going on. Those are to the best. And yeah, you're always welcome to come to Toronto and to visit University of Toronto of cars and are enjoying great Lake Ontario.

Stuart Carlton 29:02
Done and done. Well, we'll put links to both of those in the show notes. And Maria, Detroit's Associate Professor of biogeochemistry in the University of Toronto, thank you for coming on and teaching us all about the Great Lakes.

Dr. Maria Dietrich 29:15
You're very welcome. It was my great pleasure.

Stuart Carlton 29:42
Thanks so much to Maria for joining us and talking about that, that really interesting paper that is kind of terrifying in its own way. But I think it's really valuable whenever huge groups of scientists can get together and sort of, you know, talk about their collective I would call it lessons learned, you know, they say it as a warning. And of course there's a warning involved but it's like This is what we know, as a group of scientists who all work on related issues, right. And the

Carolyn Foley 30:05
whole thing about science is, you know, the the more you see a certain thing, the more certain you are that it's actually happening. And when you are considering ways to address it, the more times that that those work, the more you should do,

Stuart Carlton 30:18
that's a really cool when we're seeing these patterns, not just in like Michigan or not just like Michigan, not just the Great Lakes, but across the nation and the globe. That's pretty meaningful.

Carolyn Foley 30:27
Yeah. Yeah, that's really, really cool.

Stuart Carlton 30:30
So what is one thing that you learned about the Great Lakes today, Carolyn?

Carolyn Foley 30:35
So I thought it was really interesting that they, you know, by bumping down the surface area size by, you know, 500 kilometers squared to 100 kilometers squared, they managed to capture 90% Was it of the all the surface area of the inland places that are not necessarily all freshwater lakes? But that's pretty Yeah, she

Stuart Carlton 30:56
said surface area and volume, which I guess is not inherently surprising, but it's still still notable. I agree. That's a it's amazing that so much of our, our now she said, world's lakes. So I don't know how rivers we should tune in for some future episode where I asked a lot about that. But still so much of our lake water is contained in really, really kind of large lakes. That is interesting. And related to that the thing I think I mentioned it a couple of times, but that sort of to me counterintuitive relationship between surface area and susceptibility to climate change specifically, I thought was was pretty interesting. And this was sort of tricky about science and anything is it's not always obvious, right?

Carolyn Foley 31:37
Right. Yeah. And that's why it's important to have people who are thinking about it and being objective and trying to figure out what the, the answer is, I will say that the one thing that I meant to ask that I didn't when she talked about the mud that was locally. And when I started out as a reacher researcher in the Great Lakes, there's this thing called a poner. It's like a big set of jaws, you can drop down to the bottom and you pull up the sediment. And whenever you're sampling, you sort of sit through depending on what you're looking for. Sometimes you want the fine sediments. Sometimes you want the invertebrates, which you can guess which one I was going for, but one time we pulled up this mud and the field crew that I was telling, we were like, Man, this looks fantastic. And one person said we should just give ourselves a facial with it. So I like grabbed a full handful and like rubbed it all over my face. And you know, thinking back when I was young, that was my first field job. There's a chance that maybe I should not have ripped that all over my face. But

Stuart Carlton 32:34
I should have at least done the bio geochemical sampling first and found out exactly, exactly.

Carolyn Foley 32:39
The samples before that are adequate claim or something. But yeah, anyway,

Stuart Carlton 32:45
we'll just autoclave your face afterwards. That's like young scientists insults your face. Great. Well, where should people go if they want to find out more about Sea Grant Carolyn in case I don't remember the social media stuff.

Carolyn Foley 33:02
And well, they can visit our website, I see grant dashboard, or we are on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and sugar. And I believe all of those are i l i n. S E G Gral

Stuart Carlton 33:21
are in Sea Grant for Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant and you can find more of our podcast at teach me about the great lakes.com Or follow it on the Twitter feed, which I'm going to successfully tell you right now is twitter.com/teach Great Lakes. Well, thank you so much for joining us, everybody. We'll see you again on the first and Monday of every month, the third Monday of most months. And in the meantime, keep great in those lakes. Summers the outro there it is

did I hear you singing that?

Carolyn Foley 34:00
I sing one. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 34:03
that was good. Almost. Probably better than I did.