Category Archives: Lake Champlain

Facts about Lake Champlain

Lake Champlain Valley Named a Top Fall Travel Destination

Lake Champlain Valley: Top Fall Travel Destination

See the vibrant colors of New England’s autumn season reflected in the placid waters of Lake Champlain, the other great lake.

Lake Champlain Valley : top fall travel destination

FlipKey.com, the vacation rental company of leading travel site, TripAdvisor announced that based on industry research and traveler feedback, the Lake Champlain Valley has been recognized as a Top Destination for Fall Travel. This determination was based on a variety of factors, including the unique seasonal activities of our area, enjoyable weather and a travelers’ special memories created with family and friends!

 

While this announcement is not news to those of lucky enough to live in the Lake Champlain Valley, it does help to promote our area so that even more travelers will realize that Lake Champlain is not only a great place to visit, but a top fall travel destination. 

TripAdvisor® is the world’s largest travel site (Source: comScore Media Metrix), enabling travelers to plan and have the perfect trip. TripAdvisor offers trusted advice from real travelers and a wide variety of travel choices and planning features with seamless links to booking tools. TripAdvisor branded sites make up the largest travel community in the world, with more than 260 million unique monthly visitors (Source: Google Analytics), and over 100 million reviews and opinions covering more than 2.7 million accommodations, restaurants and attractions. 

Middlebury College’s New Lake Champlain Research Vessel is Home

 

Middlebury College’s new Lake Champlain research vessel, the RV David Folger, has completed the journey from Vancouver, British Columbia, and is now berthed at its’ new home Point Bay Marina in Charlotte, Vermont. The official dedication on October 20, 2012.

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Why a Lake Champlain Research Vessel?

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From: Blogs Dot Middlebury

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Middlebury College is blessed by its proximity to Lake Champlain, a 435-square-mile lake – the sixth largest in the US. An historic waterway and the birthplace of the US Navy, the lake contains many shipwrecks. It borders Vermont, New York, and Quebec and sits at the center of the region’s ecosystems, which boast impressive biodiversity. The region also holds 34 hazardous-waste sites and 95 landfills, yet the lake is a major source of drinking water for roughly 200,000 people. Compared to the Great Lakes, however, Lake Champlain remains under-studied.

For 24 years, Middlebury College’s research vessel, the R/V Baldwin (RVB), served the College as a “floating laboratory” on Lake Champlain. This remarkable facility provided unique opportunities for faculty-student collaborative research, research training, and teaching in Geology, Biology, and Environmental Studies, but by 2009 the RVB had reached its limits. It was nearly 30 years old, was last upgraded in 1990, and couldn’t be renovated any further.

Though well equipped, the RVB was undersized and out-of-date for research and class requirements, and maintenance costs were escalating. Weight-load limits restricted the amount of gear on the vessel, which meant that equipment had to be unloaded and reloaded for most trips. Because of Lake Champlain’s length (~100 miles) and the vessel’s slow speed (6–8 knots), it often took longer than a single day to reach research sites. The RVB was unsuited for the short, choppy storm waves on Lake Champlain, so it couldn’t work on the Main Lake during rough conditions. Research access on the lake was restricted mainly to the narrow, weed-choked southern regions. The RVB’s size also restricted student access to lake research. Its maximum capacity was adequate for most summertime faculty and senior-thesis research, but during the academic year some classes had to go out multiple times to accomplish a single research “errand,” while other classes had to be split up — or couldn’t be accommodated at all.

In 2006, an external review of the Geology Department (the main user of the RVB) recommended replacing the RVB with a larger, more seaworthy vessel built to United States Coast Guard (USCG) T-boat safety specifications. A generous grant from the Lintilhac Foundation supported the planning effort. However, the cost of replacing the vessel was prohibitive, and the onset of the Great Recession shortly thereafter appeared to mean that this dream was now dead in the water. Then, in 2009, the National Science Foundation announced the Academic Research Infrastructure Recovery and Reinvestment (ARI-R2) Program, a funding opportunity backed by federal stimulus dollars. Because we had recently completed a feasibility report on replacing the RVB, the College was ideally prepared to apply for this funding, and to our delight, the NSF gave us the opportunity we had been yearning for: an award to replace the College’s aging research facility.

This new floating laboratory will be a College facility, used by all of the sciences. It will expand research opportunities for Middlebury College’s faculty and provide superior research training for its students. Middlebury is a leader in environmental and science experiential learning and field research, and the College is excited to be able to offer better lake access to faculty and students in the biological, chemical, and environmental sciences. The scope of research will be increased by gaining access to the entire lake, reducing transit times to research sites, and providing a stable, up-to-date platform for high-quality research. Improving and expanding research capabilities on Lake Champlain will generate new knowledge in several disciplines about the lake itself, the region, and freshwater lakes in general.

This project will also add a sophisticated research vessel with advanced capabilities and greater capacity to the research infrastructure on Lake Champlain, enhancing interdisciplinary inquiry not only for more Middlebury College students and faculty, but for other members of the local educational community. The new facility will:

  • enable faculty at other local colleges to give students hands-on training in research techniques that would otherwise be unavailable
  • provide research training to local K-12 teachers
  • offer outreach to “land-locked” institutions and organizations in Vermont that need lake access
  • advance development of a nautical archaeology program in the Lake Champlain basin
  • produce data with environmental benefits to the region

With this new research vessel, Middlebury College will prepare highly qualified candidates to enter professions in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields. Many of our students earn advanced degrees in ocean sciences, and the new facility will help Middlebury College to carry on and expand that tradition.

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Seiches

Seiches

Lake Champlain Seiches

photo: Minnesota Sea Grant
http://www.seagrant.umn.edu/superior/processes

Even when the lake seems dead calm, there is still a lot of movement going on. Storming along at nearly 30 miles per hour, is a surface seiche. And below that, an internal wave the length of the lake is rolling.

When you blow on a coffee or bowl of soup that is too hot, you see miniature waves build up against the far side of the container. Now take this effect and amplify it to fit a windstorm on Lake Champlain. This is how a seiche forms.

As wind blows across the surface of the water, it creates friction that drags the water with the wind. Across a lake as large as Champlain, a significant amount of water will build up at one end of the lake. When the wind stops, however, gravity takes over and the water is free to rush back. As this oscillation continues, a single standing wave is formed. On Lake Champlain this wave takes approximately 4 hours to make its trip back and forth.

Any good fisherman knows the importance of taking into account temperature and depth. The deeper the water, the colder the temperature. This change is not gradual, however. There are very distinct boundaries where it drops. These temperature layers are called thermoclines and are created by differences in the water density at varying temperatures. Cold water is denser, so it sinks. Warm water is less dense, so it sits on top of the cold.

As the seiche flows along the lake, it pushes the thermocline with it, changing the depth of the temperature boundaries. This means two things: one, the thermocline, and therefore temperatures, are always moving. And two, the variable bottom structure of Lake Champlain causes a secondary seiche to occur. As the surface seiche moves, the thermocline will run into shelves, reefs, and other objects that restrict its flow through the lake. This disturbance in the flow causes a wave within the layer of the thermocline that was obstructed. Due to the differences in water density, the denser water along the bottom pushes up against the warmer water, resulting in colder water near the surface. Gravity, of course, will push the heavier water back down, creating the wave. In Lake Champlain, the secondary seiche, which can get from 10-20 meters tall, takes approximately 4 days to complete its end-to-end journey.

What does this all mean for fisherman? Seiches can cause drastic changes in water temperatures in a very quick time. Temperature-sensitive fish are likely not going to be staying put through the fluctuations. A temperature gauge is essential to find out where the thermocline is, and where the fish are.

For more information, check out these resources.

Originally posted September 25, 2012 by Eric_LaMontagne on LCI’s ‘So You think You Know Champlain?’

Lake Champlain Books

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Lake Champlain Books

Lake Champlain books

“Here a scene of indescribable sublimity burst upon us. Before us lay the waters of Lake Champlain, a sheet of unruffled glass, stretching some ninety miles to the south, widening and straitening as rocks and cliffs projected in the most fantastic shapes into the channel. On each side is a thick and uninhabited wilderness, now rising up into mountains, now falling into glens, while a noble background is presented toward the east by the Green Mountains, whose summits appear even to pierce the clouds. On the west mountains still more gigantic in loftiness, pride and dignity. I cannot by any powers of language do justice to such a scene.”

R.G. Gleig, a member of Gen. Fraser’s staff, June 1777

( at his first view of Lake Champlain )

In the Lake Champlain Books section of Lake Champlain Life we feature a variety of books that deal with the people, history, science and natural beauty of Lake Champlain.

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Articles Featuring Lake Champlain Books:

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Lake Champlain Phosphorus Levels (20 year chart)

Lake Champlain Phosphorus Levels for past 20 years

 

Lake Champlain Phosphorus Amounts Chart image

Amounts of Lake Champlain Phosphorus

This chart created by the Addison Independent from Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, Water Management Division data shows the number of metric tons of Phosphorus in Lake Champlain per year from 1991 through 2011. The chart focuses on three Vermont watersheds, namely Otter Creek, the Winooski River and the Missisquoi River.

Last year’s record spring flooding and Tropical Storm Irene caused unprecedented amounts of phosphorus to be dumped into Lake Champlain. In some cases the amounts were two to three times the average high mean levels. These high Phosphorus levels are responsible for the widespread and sudden appearance of Blue-Green Algae, or cyanobacteria blooms that have closed beaches around the Lake.

“Phosphorus is key to causing the dense cyanobacteria blooms,” according to Angela Shambaugh, aquatic biologist for the Water Management Division at the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources and a leading authority on cyanobacteria. “That bulk of algae really can’t grow without phosphorus, and it takes a lot of phosphorus to create that amount of biomass.”

In Vermont, cyanobacteria live in warm, shallow waters that get lots of sun and low winds. And they flourish most where their primary source of food  – phosphorus – is most abundant. As the above chart illustrates, Lake Champlain Phosphorus levels have never been higher. Warmer weather and calmer wind and waves provide the ideal conditions for the formation of Blue-Green Algae blooms and have contributed to our current outbreaks.

Lake Champlain phosphorus levels lead to Blue-Green Algae Bloom

Boaters, swimmers, water-skiers, waders, parents, pet-owners and residents should become familiar with the appearance of blue-green algae (cyanobacteria). Avoid contact with dense accumulations of these algae. Children are at higher risk because they are more likely to drink the water. Pets should not be allowed in algae-contaminated water, because they will also drink the water and consume algae on their fur.

For more information on the causes, dangers and prevention of Blue-Green Algae blooms see Blue-Green Algae Tips.

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Further Reading: 

Blue-Green Algae Tips, (LakeChamplainLife.com)

Lake Champlain Blue-Green Algae Bloom Status Map, (Vt Dept. of Health)

Lake Champlain, Environmental Reports, (VT ANR)

Blue-green Algae, Information Bulletin, (NYS Dept. of Health)

Cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) in Vermont, (VT ANR)

Blue-green algae and our surface water, (MDDEP, Quebec)

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