Disclaimer: This is an automated transcript, we apologize for any errors. If you notice any problems, please email the show at teachmeaboutthegreatlakes@gmail.com. Thank you.

Stuart Carlton 0:00
teach me about the Great Lakes teach me about the Great Lakes. Welcome back to teach me about the Great Lakes a twice monthly podcast in which I A Great Lakes novice get people who are smarter and better looking than I am. I'm supposed to say harder working. But anyway, they're smarter and harder working in sometimes better looking than I am to teach me all about the Great Lakes. I am joined this week by a bout of COVID insomnia. And my good friend Carolyn Foley Carolyn, how are you?

Carolyn Foley 0:29
I apparently slept better than you last night. So I'm doing great.

Stuart Carlton 0:32
Yeah, I've got I've got the no sleep, lots of coffee thing going on. And it shows already. It always makes for a more interesting episode, though, when I don't know what's going to come out of my mouth. Alright, let's get to it. Yeah, let's get to it. Just see what happens. But I'm actually really excited about this episode, because this is a topic that comes up again and again and again. And we're going to do at least one if not two, or three or more episodes about this going forward. And that is the idea of rising lake levels. Because my understanding is and I don't know a lot about this, but lake levels are high right now. Maybe historically high, maybe not right?

Carolyn Foley 1:05
They are historically high in many of the Laurentian Great Lakes. Yes, we will hear more about that from our guest in a minute. But yeah, they. It's crazy. Right now, docks are underwater. It's completely nuts.

Stuart Carlton 1:15
No kidding. And so I'm interested to hear the extent of that. And I did a lot of work on helping people adapt to and mitigate sea level rise when I was in the Gulf South. But this is a little bit different deal. So with that, let's cue interstitial music and talk to our guest about this

one. Our guest today is Dr. Adam Beckley. He is a coastal engineering outreach specialist with Wisconsin Sea Grant over in Madison. Adam, how are you? I'm good, Stuart, thanks

Dr. Adam Bechle 1:54
for having me.

Stuart Carlton 1:55
Oh, we're so happy to have you on here to talk about this really important topic that I'm completely ignorant about. And I need to get less ignorant fast, for reasons that I might talk to Carolyn about later. So but let's start actually the very basics. You're a coastal engineer, or coastal engineering outreach specialist, what is coastal engineering. So

Dr. Adam Bechle 2:13
coastal engineering is really kind of building constructing all the things along our coasts. So it ranges from things like shore protection, to protect buildings that are close to the, to the coast, ports, harbors and marinas. And something that when I say built and constructed, you know, we might think of hard gray structures rock and concrete, but also living shorelines nature based shorelines where we're working with nature to try to protect the coast or provide habitat, building beaches, having vegetation and and trying to work with with natural features to help keep our coasts healthy and strong.

Carolyn Foley 3:00
So you mentioned beaches. Is there also like wetlands or things like that? Do you ever build those?

Dr. Adam Bechle 3:07
Um, yeah, those those would sometimes fall under coastal engineering. I don't have a lot of experience with that. But definitely trying to do coastal wetland restoration, you may need to sort of have a hybrid approach where you have some hard, hard elements to protect from Waves while you have the wetland vegetation being able to establish behind it. So there's definitely that hybrid approach, and a lot of cases.

Stuart Carlton 3:35
So when you talk about protecting the coasts, what you're really talking about is, let me ask, are you really talking about like you're protecting, you know, where people live specifically, right? It's not so much the nature that needs protecting as much as its human development? Is that fair to say?

Dr. Adam Bechle 3:48
Yeah, you know, our coasts have been here for much longer than we have. And in the Great Lakes, they naturally erode and flood and its guess for trees and other vegetation. It can be problematic on the lake. But you know, that's what nature is intended to do. We sort of staked state ourselves down along the coast because of, you know, economic reasons to ship. You know, a lot of communities were built along the coast for that reason, and they're really pleasant places to live. But unfortunately, those natural processes, because not unfortunately, but in reality, those natural processes still happen. So erosion and flooding still comes calling for that infrastructure, buildings, businesses that we've put on the coasts, so sort of trying to keep those out of harm's way or figuring out a way to live with it.

Stuart Carlton 4:45
And so you have a PhD in this right. And so I was looking up your CV, and I didn't understand most of the words and so what do you study? Exactly? I saw something called I can't even pronounce the word is it a medio tsunami is that?

Dr. Adam Bechle 4:59
pronounce that right? Yeah. When I was a grad student, I did my dissertation on medio tsunamis in the Great Lakes. So mu tsunami, it's definitely a more common term than when I started studying it. But essentially, what it means to me is, is it's a contraction of meteorological tsunami. And so with these are rapid changes in water level of a few feet over a few minutes that are caused by storms that are moving over the over the lakes. So that's where the meteorological component comes in. So basically, what happens is the wind and the air pressure changes that come with certain types of thunderstorms. They, if there's thunderstorms moving at the same speed, that a large wave would move in the middle of a lake, that storm essentially sits on top of the wave constantly pumping energy into it and growing it and growing it. So you can kind of amplify this tsunami like wave coming across the lakes to be handful feet once it hits the coast, up to like 1015 feet have been recorded around the Great Lakes.

Carolyn Foley 6:07
Oh, my gosh. And you said that happens within the span of a few minutes that it goes up like

Dr. Adam Bechle 6:12
Yeah, so the timescale ranges, but tsunamis typically occur in that minutes to to a few hours, timespan. And so these Corona that same time span so you know, we've seen a handful of minutes up to 90 minutes. But yeah, it's it's a pretty rapid water level change when we're considering what typically we're used to on the Great Lakes and a term some people might be more familiar with is safe. And that's definitely something that happens on the Great Lakes, when water sloshes back and forth, like in a bathtub. And so that's really, really, most notably on Lake Erie. Between Toledo and buffalo, they get pretty big ones, meaning tsunamis happen a little bit faster than a stage. Whereas if you were looking at it from that the way from space, you'd actually see sort of this wave propagating across the lake, whereas Isay She kind of just see that sloshing back and forth, up and down at at the edges.

Stuart Carlton 7:14
And for listeners who are interested in learning a little bit more about Seychelles, I encourage you to visit teach me about the Great lakes.com/seventeen. And listen, Episode 17 with Meg Dotson of the National Weather Service. That episode is called flipped, float and follow. So interesting. So So then within a matter of minutes, I'm going to be realized, and I apologize for this. But so within a matter of minutes, like a small tsunami can can occur. And then those those go to the shoreline and potentially harm property and people and stuff like that disable like a warning system, or is it is it just kind of your host.

Dr. Adam Bechle 7:49
So far, there's not a whole lot of warning, we can kind of maybe as we see a storm kind of it feeling of this, this is moving at the right speed. But in terms of like a coordinated warning system, we don't really have that in the Great Lakes. It's something that's a, you know, an area of active interest in research. There are, you know, various Weather Service offices that kind of have sort of learned experience of what types of storms might look dangerous, and they may issue lake shore, a sweet hazard warning or something like that. But in terms of a reliable and consistent warning system, it really doesn't exist out there.

Carolyn Foley 8:33
Versus like on the coast of Oregon, where they've got the signs everywhere, and like, here's your plan. Yeah. Cool. Okay, I'll bring it back to Lake levels. So how. So these are instances that happen on like a shorter to longer timescale that you're talking about where the water level might go up and down, but in recent times, the Great Lakes have been experiencing just kind of consistent high water levels, right. So what's causing that. So

Dr. Adam Bechle 9:05
water levels in the Great Lakes are really kind of controlled by three things that it's essentially the supply of water into the lakes, and that is kind of summed up as net basin supply. And that that is a term that sort of encompasses all the water entering and leaving the lakes from the atmosphere. So that's precipitation directly onto the lake surface runoff from the watershed into the lakes, and then evaporation of water off of the water surface. And those are depending on which Lake you're in roughly at equivalent equivalent magnitudes, and so they kind of balance each other out. So when more water enters the lakes either through precipitation and runoff and leaves through evaporation, we see let that lake rise. Conversely, if we're getting less precipitation, runoff and help A time or evaporation, the water levels go down. And so what we've seen kind of across the Great Lakes Basin is, there's just a historically wet period of years. Looking back for the last five years, from the NOAA Climate summary, the Upper Midwest region has had the wettest five years in recorded history. So going back on 25 years, I believe, if you go back, that's kind of been the case for the last few years, every five year period going forward, has set a new record. So when you look back and say, well, 2018 was that the wettest five years? Well, it was in 2018. But it's not anymore, because we keep breaking that record. So that's, that's kind of primarily why we've seen water levels across the basin just kind of March upward, in the last seven years. And evaporate, evaporation really hasn't been too out of whack. So when we have have really high precipitation that just kind of takes over and fills up our little place.

Stuart Carlton 11:04
So even the increased temperatures and things like that aren't enough to kind of overcome the extra water coming in.

Dr. Adam Bechle 11:10
Well, so evaporation is kind of a funny, funny thing. Whereas we would think normally, hot summer weather will get a lot of evaporation. But really, the conditions where we get most of our preparation are prime in the fall in winter months. So for example, in Lake Michigan in Euro, you see evaporation peak out in let's see what month in the in December, on average, we see the highest evaporation in December. And that's because of the main components we need for evaporation. And the Great Lakes are warm water temperatures, but we need a differential in temperature between the air and the water. So cold air temperatures versus that warm water surface. And then low humidity which we get in the winter, and then high wind speeds to kind of move that humid air off the lake. And so really, we see, I think if we have warmer water temperatures consistent, we will get higher evaporation. But it's really winter where we see the evaporation.

Carolyn Foley 12:15
So I just want to point out that because people can't see that we can see each other Adam was actually just looking up when these happens. So Adam, what is it that you're looking at right now,

Dr. Adam Bechle 12:25
I was looking at some NOAA Great Lakes environmental research laboratory data where they are sort of with the Army Corps and some partners in Canada keepers of water level data on the Great Lakes. And so I was looking up sort of long term averages of of that net basin supply that I talked about. So sort of long term averages of runoff, precipitation, evaporation, and then kind of how those balance out kind of like a check checking account. And so that was just sort of the month we look at all those numbers.

Stuart Carlton 13:02
And we'll put a link to the shownotes teach me about the great lakes.com/ 22 zero because this is episode

Carolyn Foley 13:11
so that everybody can also geek out over graphs if they want to. Oh

Stuart Carlton 13:15
gee, the old goo Yeah. How long have we been on this upward trend and lake levels? Because when I did my postdoc here, West Lafayette in 2013, we're in the middle of this huge drought, right? And it seems like this year was pretty droughty as well, although I haven't really been tracking it, I'll be honest, might just be my garden suck this year. stunk. Pardon me? And so is this currently in the last year, but you're saying that it's really wet too. So? So it's a wet enough in the non drought years to make up for it? Or is it just 2012 and 13? Were anomalous, and it's been overall wet. Beyond that,

Dr. Adam Bechle 13:49
well, so 2012 2013 We inlet and Lake Michigan set an all time low water level in January of 2013. And that was not necessarily because 2012 and 2013, we actually had a period over a decade of below average water levels. So the conversation then was the water levels ever going to go back up? So it was that was sort of consistent, you know, cumulative effect of being low. And then I think, you know, a couple couple dry years kind of pushed it to that record low. And then since then, so since January 2013, the lakes have just sort of gone up. We like Michigan, Michigan, has pretty consistently gone up. But this is something that is go ahead.

Stuart Carlton 14:37
Well, this is something that changes fairly well rapidly on geologic terms right on like sea level rise, for example, which is it's gonna go up for kind of the foreseeable future. Lake levels can change on the you know, the on a year a couple year basis, I suppose.

Dr. Adam Bechle 14:52
Yeah, we won't go so we're close to record highs. Now we won't go back down to average next year. It takes you know, a few years to kind of To get from from the extremes back to the middle. But yeah, pretty geologic timescales. Yeah, pretty darn rapid.

Carolyn Foley 15:08
So when you're talking about lake levels, and you're saying, you know, on Lake Michigan, Lake Michigan here on which, sorry, lakes period, that is the biggest lake when you put them together, but, um, so there's a couple of different points that water levels are sort of controlled in the Great Lakes, right? Where are those and who sort of is responsible for control? Yeah,

Dr. Adam Bechle 15:31
the terms control has to be we don't have full control over the water levels. In fact, we have no think whenever the Army Corps presents Ms. They say, you know, Mother Nature controls feet and humans control inches. So we do have some hydraulic structures where we can kind of change how much water is flowing between the lakes, and in some cases, diversions in and out of the lake. So the main ones are the out of Lake Superior into Lake Huron, Michigan, is controlled by the St. Mary's dam, the compensating works, that kind of controls how much water is being read out of Lake Superior men. Again, there's not another dam that controls flow between the lakes until the most Saunders dam that is less water out of the St. Lawrence Seaway, sort of out of Lake Ontario in and out into the ocean. And so there are kind of those two control points. And then there are some diversions that either go in or out of the lakes. And so one, one main one that people are probably familiar with is the Chicago River. That that was was reversed back in the, the, you know, in 1900 ones completed. And so I have a couple of numbers for that. Just to put things in perspective. There's about three 200 cubic feet per second of water going out of Lake Michigan, through the Chicago River and now into the Mississippi River Basin. So over the course of an entire year, that is 750 billion gallons of water. Sounds like a lot. That only amounts to about an inch of water out of Lake Michigan here. When you average that across the Waterson Oh. So when they say Mother Nature controls feet and humans control inches. That's that's one example.

Stuart Carlton 17:35
So think about the drivers here, I want to I want to focus on that again for a second. So it seems to be mainly be this net, hang on, let me get the term right net basin supply. And when that's when you have more supply than or when that's higher, I guess you get the higher lake levels. And so when I think about sea level rise, you think about things like thermal expansion, right, the idea that water expands as it gets warmer, and that's a pretty significant driver. My understanding is of sea level, once you get on like the ocean scale, even just a little bit of expansion means a fair amount of growth in terms of the relative sea level, its thermal expansion. Is that is that? Is there a climate story generally when it comes to lake level rise? Or is it just happening? You know, for other reasons that aren't necessarily climate related?

Dr. Adam Bechle 18:19
Well, I think it's not as direct of a story as sea level rise, because we don't have any glaciers in the Great Lakes basin. And Lake Ontario was about 250 feet above sea level. So if the Great Lakes start getting sea level rise, and we're in a world of hurt sea levels. So So thermal expansion, I'm not super familiar with that impact in in the Great Lakes, but it would definitely be less in the Great Lakes just because the oceans are miles deeper, as the Great Lakes are, you know, their deepest, you know, over 1000 feet, but so it won't be as much water kind of expanding, so it won't have as much of a net effect. But there is sort of a climate story in that know those net basin supply components are definitely shifting, precipitation under under climate change, we're expected to see a wetter climate so so we can expect more precipitation but then on. On the flip side, with warmer temperatures, we may expect more evaporation because we can have you know warmer temperatures in the winter to drive more evaporation. Previously, the sort of science in the modelling predicted a potential trend downward in lake levels, but recent kind of corrections to how evaporation is treated have kind of muddied the waters. We're not 100% Sure. There's not really a clear trend what Long term like levels of upward or downward. But there's there's anticipating some of those swings might be more extreme, we may see higher highs and lower lows just because we may expect more extremes in precipitation and in drought. And certainly, you know, seeing record five year precipitation for the past three or four years can be an indication of differences in the climate.

Stuart Carlton 20:27
So one thing I'd like to do is sort of talk about we're talking about like, levels are very high now, and they will be for a bit and then they may get lower, they may not. And this is sort of going to be something that is a feature, I guess, going forward of living in the Great Lakes area. So I imagine a lot of your work with Wisconsin secret is working with governments to help adapt, I guess, to to lake levels, higher lake levels now and potentially lower ones in the future. What is the work that you're doing there? And what can local governments do to help prep for this?

Dr. Adam Bechle 20:56
Yeah, so I do spend a lot of time with Wisconsin communities to try and try and figure out what their path forward is how to respond, and how to think the future to be resilient to these changes. And, you know, there's not a there's not a one size fits all solution, it really is dependent on sort of what's at risk, and sort of how much money is available, and what some of the options are, you know, there's there's sort of, for guess, usually, I recommend kind of prioritizing. Okay, what is what is, what's critical, what is what is imminently at risk, and what needs to be what's critical and really needs to be planned for, for future effects. And so, you know, there's are things that that can't move, things that need to stay functional things that are, are vital to the community, you know, there's the sort of defend option or add some, some coastal protection or beef them up.

Stuart Carlton 21:57
And so those would be things like, like, I mean, who knows what, but critical infrastructure, buildings, roads, hospitals, stuff like that? Yeah, I

Dr. Adam Bechle 22:03
mean, water treatment, plants, wastewater, and drinking water, those are right on the Great Lakes. And so so those are critical. And by nature in sort of a hazardous area, so yeah, so so there's that option, and that's often a first thought for a lot of people is we've got to, we've got to hold the line and fight back the waves, which is, which is not a trivial task. You know, shore protection is kind of gets constantly battered. And we have to design a big enough to handle lake levels that might be higher than right now, perhaps, large storm events. And so that that's definitely has a place and then there's also sort of a thinking and planning about the future, maybe maybe homes, maybe maybe assets can be relocated, maybe when when they sort of use up their useful life when it's time to do major renewals is considering that should be relocated away from the coast. So we're not constantly fighting against the waves.

Stuart Carlton 23:07
So is there a movement now to more I felt like in when I was in Texas, that, you know, people were really appreciating more the idea of designing with nature, as opposed to kind of command and control, right. And so there was less or, well, there's still plenty of focus on like hard infrastructure and sea walls and stuff like that. But we're moving more toward a living shoreline and you know, waster reef protection type world, do you see that kind of in your field? Or is that the kind of thing where this infrastructure is so critical that we just need to build and maintain, you know, sea walls, or lake walls, or whatever the right term is? Even though maybe, if we're designing it fresh with design it differently?

Dr. Adam Bechle 23:46
So yeah, there's a sort of a spectrum of incorporating nature into these sorts of designs, and I'm a Great Lakes, it's definitely an emerging field, it's not as well established as, say, the Gulf or the Atlantic, we don't have oysters that we can use for oyster beds. And our growing season makes things a bit tough to get, say Marsh vegetation established. So is it isn't expanding field, where we maybe take hybrid approaches and the open coasts of the Great Lakes is you can't just get by on vegetation alone and expect spec to hold protect critical assets with that. So incorporating things like you know, living resentments where you incorporate a lot of vegetation, upland can be good for habitat, having a series of maybe some offshore breakwaters, where you can have a bit more naturalized shoreline behind it, but you still are using green infrastructure to help reduce that wave energy. Like I said, it's really kind of a growing field and we'll see a lot of changes, I think in the coming years and, and this is this has been an impetus these high water levels have certainly been an impetus to try and figure out those sorts of things.

Stuart Carlton 24:57
And so then on the individual level, we're recording this and Early October, just this morning was the first 30 Something degree morning in West Lafayette. And so it's a reminder that, as Ned Stark says, winter is coming. And so as the winter comes, a lot of people start to worry about the lake levels and how it might affect their homes. Are there things that people can do to prep for the over winter period when it comes to lake levels?

Dr. Adam Bechle 25:24
Over the winter? Yeah, we definitely see our largest storms in the winter, that's when we see a lot of our erosion and flooding. And so, you know, really, it's sort of figuring out where do I stand in I imminent, riskier how close and I to to the, to an eroding shoreline or maybe a flood elevation. And that's not really something you can do just you know, there's some cases where it's very clear, the house is 10 feet off half of an eroding cliffs. And that's very clear, something needs to be done. Other times, it can be a bit more ambiguous, depending on if you're on a bluff set or how high the Bluff is, what materials it's composed of what the current slope is. So kind of if there's a concern about sort of an imminent risk, it's sort of getting some professional help to figure out how, how fast do I have to act? Is this something I get to do now? And then as we get towards winter, you know, it's a similar set of options on a smaller scale, which is you know, it's something you you dig in and defend uninstaller event men are a seawall because erosion is that close. When that happens, again, with the example of a like a bluff, you need to figure out is the bluff stable enough? Even if you put in shore protection, that bluff may still be unstable, and could potentially fail back to the house? So figuring thinking holistically? And then also, you know, if there's space, can you move your house, can you relocate your house on a lot get it away from from an erosion zone or higher up from flooding area, oftentimes, staying out of the way is the most cost effective and effective overall, way to deal with this and then as we get towards winter, one thing that can be problematic, specifically on Bluff Kosis is frost heave or water gets in the bluff soil and then freezes and wedges apart the bluff. So trying to try to manage water on these coastal sites and keep them away from eroding bluffs. For example, pointing your downspouts not towards the lake but away from the lake. Avoiding timing and things like that. Trying to keep a bluff. Rough as dry as possible is one thing that can be considered one of the easier solutions. Yeah,

Stuart Carlton 27:42
you mentioned getting professional help. But does that mean like call up a coastal engineer call up you if it was constant? Who were the who is the professional in this situation?

Dr. Adam Bechle 27:51
Yeah, coastal engineers are a geologist and and sometimes experienced contractors can can really either have a sense from looking at a site and knowing the area or be able to run those sort of calculations. And at least at Wisconsin Sea Grant, we have a list of known coastal engineers and contractors that do work in Wisconsin, they also have offices, other places in the Great Lakes, I think New York segment has a similar list. And then also local, local zoning offices, local land management offices, may or may not have some expertise, because they deal with these situations a lot. So they might be able to help them and they might, they might not have that expertise, but it's definitely worth the call and the seeds.

Stuart Carlton 28:37
Okay, great. Well, Adam, this is really interesting, and we appreciate you coming on to talk about that. But that's actually not why we invited you on teach me about the Great Lakes we invited you on teach me about the Great Lakes to answer two questions. And the first one is this. If you could have a great donut for breakfast or a great sandwich for lunch, which one would it be?

Dr. Adam Bechle 28:55
I would go with the sandwich. I remember sandwiches, but I don't have a lot of memories. Definitely a good doughnuts, but not, not a lot of.

Stuart Carlton 29:07
So when I'm in Madison next, where should they go to get a really great chance.

Dr. Adam Bechle 29:12
I am partial to stasis Valley, which is a short walk from my house. I am a big fan of

Stuart Carlton 29:17
stalls these deli great, I will put a link to that in the show notes. And head there next time I'm in Madison. And we'd like to leave our listeners with a little bit of life advice. It can be big or little serious or silly. It doesn't matter just something that they can take with them to turn around in their head as they sit there and wait two weeks between episodes. So and um, what is a piece of life advice that you have for our listeners,

Dr. Adam Bechle 29:38
I would say take time to sort of be appreciative of things in their life. And I think that, you know, sometimes it's pertinent in this job too because sometimes they get a little flustered. You know, obviously with high water levels being high, there's a lot going on. It can it can really be stressful but then I step back and think that I really get to work with a lot of Write people on a lot of interesting things and try and help them. And so I really appreciate that. So for me personally is taking that that time to reflect and appreciate.

Stuart Carlton 30:09
I love it. Well, Adam, where can people go if they want to find? Find out more about the work that you do if they want to give like a social media thing? Or should they go to the secret homepage, what works for you?

Dr. Adam Bechle 30:20
We have, yeah, Wisconsin Sea Grant has our page and then you can find coastal engineering and processes where a lot of this information is housed. We also have an ongoing project where we keep posting on on monthly on Great Lakes water levels at SCE wi coastal resilience.org has water level information and marketing's trying to try to adapt to the resilience

Stuart Carlton 30:43
and that stands for Southeast Wisconsin eyes who? Correct right well, we will put links to those also in the show notes. Dr. Adam Beckley, coastal engineering outreach specialist with Wisconsin Sea Grant, thank you so much for coming on and teaching us all about the Great Lakes.

Dr. Adam Bechle 30:58
Thank you, it's been great.

Stuart Carlton 31:22
So lake levels, that's interesting. So it's actually a fair amount different from sea level, and that it's not like this upward rise that is going to continue. It's more of a fluctuation situation.

Carolyn Foley 31:31
Right. And there are so many different components that people are trying to figure out. It's, um, we can talk some more about modeling and all the predictions that you can and cannot make right now. Fortin to gather more data. Yep.

Stuart Carlton 31:44
Yeah. I mean, I agree with that important to fund scientists to do that work and of course, fun social scientists to help with the adaptation side. But yeah, so I thought that was that was really interesting. But it's another thing I realized, we need to rename this podcast from teaching about the Great Lakes to like, sad and scared, or things that are worrying, or something like that. Because it's I feel like we've been focusing a lot lately on all the different ways in which environmental harm is coming home to roost lately,

Carolyn Foley 32:15
when you listen to what Adam's advice was, and you say, like, well, you know, there's still good stuff out there. We're helping people, we're figuring things out, we're helping them adapt. And it'll be great.

Stuart Carlton 32:25
Well, you're right. Well, I mean, great or not, it'll be but no, I think you're right, there's a lot of steps that people can take him. And that's actually a significant problem. And one thing that we'll want to talk about at some point is, it's just that it's like, you know, you don't want to get overwhelmed, because if I feel like I'm not just talking about the Great Lakes environment right now. But if you focus so much on bad stuff, without focusing on the steps you can take to make it less bad or better. You risk getting overwhelmed. And that's not a great way to be.

Carolyn Foley 32:51
Yeah, I periodically braking to Always Look on the bright side of life. Like, so if you were at my house, then you would know it's time to start singing.

Stuart Carlton 33:01
Yeah, but there's one particular line in there that

Carolyn Foley 33:05
likes a piece of spit is what I saw them perform for Queen Elizabeth the second one time, and I remember like, eagerly staring at the screen, and it was like,

Stuart Carlton 33:14
what are they gonna say? Like, some piece of spit when you look at it? Yeah. All right.

Carolyn Foley 33:19
So what the thing that I learned today, because I know you're gonna ask me, really interesting that evaporation processes in the Great Lakes are not all, you know, he said, they're not that out of whack compared with what happened? Because I've heard a lot about winter ice cover. And as that's retreating, you know, the evaporation. But based on what Adam was saying, it seems like it's really the precipitation in the wet, which is making things go up, which I found really neat.

Stuart Carlton 33:48
Yeah, I agree. I agree. And that I thought was interesting. And to me, the main thing, again, that I learned was just that this is not an up up up thing. But it's a fluctuation thing. And it's, so I thought that was cool. And even though it wasn't the main topic, hang on, let me get it right, medio tsunamis, I found to be both interesting and terrifying. So I have to read a lot more about those.

Carolyn Foley 34:08
There's some really, really cool stuff that people have been putting out trying to explain those that we can put links

Stuart Carlton 34:15
to really like, like, videos or explainer type things. Yeah,

Carolyn Foley 34:19
variety, variety of outputs. But yeah, we'll put links to a couple of them down in the bottom, and maybe we'll talk. I mean, you've mentioned them a couple of times, right? In different episodes. So you'll know maybe you haven't eat edit that out, too.

Stuart Carlton 34:33
Oh, maybe I have

Carolyn Foley 34:38
made a bad guest.

Stuart Carlton 34:39
So I'd forgotten about him. Oh, it's very possible. I forget about a lot of things.

Carolyn Foley 34:46
Carolyn's part of it means my work.

Stuart Carlton 34:49
It's all good. Yeah, well, anyway, so So that's interesting. And I want to look into that. And I wonder, so my question is, I mean, I didn't want to derail this, but I wonder like, how predictable are those? Will they be predictable? I mean, it's That's really hard. If it crops up that quickly, I don't you know, we talked about how hard it was to predict Doritos. I can't imagine these mediums. Tsunamis are unpredictable at all. But it'd be interesting to look into. So yeah, potential future episode there as well write it down. Great. What we're

Carolyn Foley 35:13
really doing is like, because I haven't mentioned waterspouts, but we're going to talk about Waterstones, it's going to be all whether

Stuart Carlton 35:21
it's whether in sadness, that's, yeah, waterspouts are great. I used to go fishing out on the golf with my dad, and we would sometimes see waterspouts and drive the other way in the boat, but they're really amazing things. So yeah, what's the waterspouts? I think we need to, we need to find an episode full of happy talk. So I'm gonna work on that for the next few weeks, maybe not next episode because of what we have planned. But maybe a couple episodes after that, we'll see. But we always want to be happy on TV about the Great Lakes. So anyway,

Carolyn Foley 35:50
we make that joke. What's the bedroom? No, I was gonna say we can make that oh, yeah,

Stuart Carlton 35:55
we can make that I mean, you can I have never made a bad joke. But anyway, I encourage you all to follow us on all of the social media. So you should run out right now to your phone or your computer web browser or your tablet, and go to www.twitter.com/i L I N Sea Grant to follow Illinois-Indiana Sea Grant main feed, you can follow the show itself on teach Great Lakes, on the on Twitter, and Illinois-Indiana. Sea Grant were on all the social media at i Li and Sea Grant. So if you don't like that, maybe you like Facebook, do the Facebook. There's probably more social media. So do those two.

Carolyn Foley 36:34
Yeah. Or you can send emails or you know, people actually do still receive letters as well, like

Stuart Carlton 36:41
a letter. Actually, I would love that. Send us a card, write us a letter. It won't arrive until I get back in the office next year, probably but it'll be a nice little treat. So you can send that 195 Marsteller West Lafayette, Indiana 47907 And we look forward to receiving that in the year. Well anyway, thank you so much for listening. We appreciate it. Make sure you do the likes and the subscribes tell all your friends about us. And we will see you on the first Monday of every month and the third Monday of most months. And until then, keep grinding those legs awesome.

Carolyn Foley 37:22
Always Look on the bright side saw I'd have that sorry.

Stuart Carlton 37:29
Your terminal breath Oh God. Don't hold your computer really. I don't want to be responsible for free or for this is gonna be Yeah, this may be at the end.