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Wednesday Nite at the Lab >> Thank tonight.watching
I'm Cassie Immel and I work here
This evening we'll have Luke at the Biotech Center.
Limnology. Winslow from the Center of
the Center of Limnology from Luke is a graduate student from
He's currently working on his PhD with Paul Hanson and Emily
Stanley.
include understanding the Hinfluence of physics onas
phytoplankton, a type of algae, and dynamics and understanding
the extent and role of lakes at the continental and global
scales. Luke received his bachelor's
degree in material science and
Tonight he will enlighten all of engineering also here at the UW.
Observatory program. us on the Global Lakes Ecology
Luke Winslow. So, witho>> Thank you.o, here is
[APPLAUSE]
I'm Luke Winslow, and I was all prepared tonight to thank you
guys for braving the drought
[LAUGHTER] and coming here...
thank you for braving the storm But and coming here.e to
So, I'm going to be talking tonight mostly about the latter
half of some of my work which includes looking at what we've
dubbed global limnology, lakes
what they do. But a lot of it's also going to
be about my story, and it's really going to be kind of a
journey through what got me to
science is about individual researcher's backgrounds, what
our history is, where we came from, what particular experience
we've had that brought us to the
So of course I have to start research that we're at.
who are actually here tonight. with my hometown and my parents,
small town southwest of here. I'm froIt's very famous.consin,
It's very famous for two things:
and once Johnny Depp was in the DarliDarlington. Festival
[LAUGHTER]
on their website. It was a very big deal.
These are my parents, Amanda and Jerry Winslow.
I am the son of an educator, of a teacher, and of a mechanic,
and you'll see how that crops up
life throughout this in what I do for the rest of my
And I also would like to note that although it looks there
that they're avid downhill
last time they were ever in skiers, downhill skis.irst and
[LAUGHTER]
around technology and the Toutdoors in kind of a weirden
combination.
some of my old photographs, that And I realized, going through
building something, or outdoors I was our primary activity.ng,
And so throughout my life I wasn't really sure exactly what
I wanted to do because those
together. I knew a lot of biologists who
studied biology but wasn't
I knew a lot of mechanics, really in the technology realm.
And so when I came to Madison I actually went into engineering.
And I did material science and
It was a fairly broad field. engineering.
My senior thesis ended up being this semiconducting properties
of pentacene, which is organic
I won't go into details of that. semiconductor.
While here as a student though, II have to say University oft.
Wisconsin Madison has a phenomenal variety, maybe you
already know this, but a
opportunities. phenomenal variety of
for a job, I had previously been And one summer, I was looking
summers before, and I decided I wwant to do something differenty
this summer.
Center website, and I saw a job Soadvertised for the Center ofob
Limnology, and I applied. And I got rejected.
And so I saw another job from the Center of Limnology and I
got it. And that summer then I did a
lake survey going through almost
The goal of the survey was to 20sample a random sampling ofin.
lakes.
pick randomly from them. So you just take all lakes and
actually really had never been And this is something that
Most surveys that had been done previous to that point usually
have some sort of size cut-off. So what we ended up doing is
driving down back forest roads, climbing through thickets.
I actually had the opportunity
through such dense overgrowth, that summer then, from walking
of my clothes and also in my to get both grass stains on all
thick in that area. cro>> Too much information. so
[LAUGHTER]
ridiculous. Anyway, I got asked then to stay
on. I had, all through high school,
I had a great deal of interest
technology. So I was asked to stay on by my
adviser, my now adviser, at that
work computer support in the time boss, Paul Hanson, and to
fantastic opportunity. department which I thought was a
And this is really where I I also loved computers.
technology and the environment started to learn that computing
And I was then given the can go together.
So here I actually learned about opportunity to, oh wait, sorry.
environmental sensing opportunities we were having at
the Center of Limnology.
the professional buoy boy. So in 2007 I became what I call
here at Madison, and I got the I graduated from my undergrad
environmental sensing buoys opwhich was really a niche andn
very difficult to do at this
studying. And so here is the University of
Wisconsin Madison limnology buoy
I've been deploying this buoy thfor the last five years now..
This is the fifth year that it's
If anybody's been out on the out there.
you've probably seen the buoy. lake in the last five years,
a lot of scientists put this at Atthe end of their talk, but In,
want to mention that almost all of the research that you're
seeing today was in some part funded by the National Science
Foundation or private donors or the University of Wisconsin
directly. And they do an excellent job,
and they work very hard to make sure that the research they're
funding is pertinent, is useful.
of review. It goes through multiple levels
funding. It's very difficult to get
recently some attacks against the National Science Foundation
by various groups arguing that
dollars, but I want to say that it does phenomenal work and you
must examine the research in a
There was a specific example, and they actually parodied it in
this commercial where they were looking at the speed at which
shrimp could run, so they had shrimp on treadmills.
But this was a much broader study to understand shrimp and
what controlled shrimping operations and the yields of
shrimp which is a very, of
So these all have to be viewed course, important industry.
So, this buoy work in Wisconsin actually ended up spawning then
the Global Lake Ecological
There are a few researchers who were at a conference, and they
said, well, geez, you guys
deployed some buoys too, and we don't know anybody else who has
deployed these things so we should talk more.
And the other researcher was a
started a very small but very requickly growing network ofis
researchers who were interested in doing this thing.
You can see it was connected
and also the northern point is between Wisconsin and Madison
Station which is the limnology the North Trout Lake Research
Northwoods in the main lake redistrict in Northwoodshe
Wisconsin.
These were some of the very first buoys that were ever
deployed. The buoy was the buoy in Taiwan
on a lake that we'll see more pictures of later, a very
interesting lake that I'll talk about.
The yellow buoy is a lake on
and very iconic lake in northern Trout Lake which is a very big
people are familiar with. WAnd the third buoy there isof
actually then a buoy on a less
be, and we'll talk about this knlater, may just be just asan
important to the grand scale of things.
This is a very small lake that
It has no name. There was nobody living on it.
It is a lake that is about the
have very important, very big sirepercussions to the grandn
scheme of things. So, then through this
involvement I had in GLEON, I first had the opportunity to go
to Taiwan and go to YYL.
I'm not very good at Chinese. But it's Yuan Yang Lake, I've
slaughtered it I'm sure, and
lake. This is a lake in the mountains
of Taiwan.
Taiwan is a very, very A lot of people don't realize
The majority of the people live on the western side of Taiwan,
but actually the eastern side is
And this is in the middle of the all mountainous region.
You can see these very steep mountains.
And what happens is that Taiwan gets hammered every year by
typhoon after typhoon.
two, three, four typhoons, what we would call hurricanes, in one
year in Taiwan. And this lake, when that occurs,
is small but in this very deep
ton of water. This water rushes down the sides
of the walls of the mountain, rushes into the lake, and what
this is is this is a thermal
could have only gotten by having profile from the lake that we
package out there. the buoy and an automated sensor
typhoon. We can't go out there in a
doubles in depth. WheSo it goes from being alake
four-meter deep lake to an
So this is the normal depth of eight-meter deep lake.
Imagine four meters higher. So it becomes a very dangerous
place, but the buoy survives
temperature profile what will actually happen is this lake is
resetting.
are a stratified system. Normally a lake is, most lakes
warm; the bottom of the lake is The top of cold.ake is very
Mendota is like this. Lakes in the Northwoods are like
this. Lakes in the Arctic for periods
of time are like this.
this. They often have this stratified
layer.
rushes through, it resets the In this typhlake.so much water
So we can kind of view this lake
one summer to look at it. asAnd also for reference, theere
total amount of rainfall that fell in those two days in this
example was almost a meter of rain.
So you can think of it as maybe 30 inches of rain in two days.
So a very large amount of rain. But, of course, that kind of
work is not always easy.
civilization from the lake. TThis was the year before I waso
there.
a flushing of the lake, but it This typhoon doesn't just bring
infrastructure and roadways. also brings major catastrophe to
going to these places. So it can often be interesting
as this network grew, we found I also ended up, we also then,
looking at various lakes in partners iArgentina.a, a group
Beautiful country.
incredible chain of lakes, which So we got to go and visit this
situation before, where in the I've never heard of such a
top point to the bottom point is span, this lake chain, from the
lake, Alcina, is almost purely perhaps 100 miles, and this
And as you move down the chain fresh water.
the other lake and they become of lakes, one lake drains into
point where Epiquin, the bottom lake, it does not have an outlet
so all this salt just comes and collects.
It collects in this bottom lake,
hypersaline lake. It is, I think, over four times
the ocean, but don't quote me on
You can actually see here, this is a picture of the lake.
This is us doing work on the
Because it has no outlet, then lake.
regulate its depth. So there times in history when
the lake was much shallower and these trees grew, and then these
lakes became much deeper and all
You can also see here at the these trees were killed.
precipitated out from bottom, tevaporation.lly salt
Every time a wave comes up, that
it grows. sThat's how salty this lake is.d
And of course then the very salty, the famous Dead Sea.
This is actually fairly recent. This is only two years ago that
I got to visit the Dead Sea, and
it with not that much interest. I I thought, oh, the Dead Sea,to
it's very famous, it's very salty, whatever, it's cool,
people swim in it.
wow. But if you ever get the chance,
Just with our hands out we are This is us in the water.
you see it. People would hold rocks above
their heads because it's so buoyant.
You're just like a cork.
when I got in there's salt But the disadvantage here is
It's very sharp. precipitated on all the rocks.
I, of course, slipped, scraped It's very jagged.
my back I get into hypersaline by back, and then after scraping
patch that hung around for the water, and I had a giant red
So beware. next week on my back.
lakes. There's also the very clear
Nevada. LakIt's on the border betweenin
California and Nevada.
example of an alpine lake, an especially big one in this case,
but an alpine lake that is
It gets very little nutrient extremely clear.
Mendota. input, unlike, say, think about
region, we have a lot of Mendota we have an agricultural
lake. They fertilize a lot of algae.
Lake Tahoe is the opposite, and Lake Tahoe is incredibly clear.
Lake Tahoe has actually, I think
it's clarity in the last 50 iyears, but it's still, you canf
still see a disc this big 26
So 75 feet more you can still see a disc as you lowering it
down in the lake. It's an incredible lake.
And that's even after losing
So very, very interesting world. some of its clarity.
Iceland. The buggy, this is a lake in
actually an entomology student I have a colleague who's
lake, and I got the opportunity who'sto visit last year. this
And this lake is literally, in
Now, I came last year and I saw Iit and I thought, oh, cool.e.
It's a nice lake. It's a very interesting lake.
It has a very high phosphorus load.
It actually has a very natural, it's a naturally eutrophic lake.
So, like Mendota, lots of algae but not due to agriculture, not
due to anything like that.
It has a cold water input which brings phosphorus in which is
coming right out of the rock
And then there's a warm water input which is very warm.
It's something like 75-80 degrees all year round, and it
brings in nitrogen. And these two inputs come into
the lake and they merge and they
They fertilize these massive create these huge algae blooms.
And what happens then is that midges, which are the small,
they have a larval stage which
of the lake, they feed on this is a worm that's in the bottom
this. And this is a midge emergence.
So this wasn't the year that I
years before. There's a midge emergence where
they form clouds. They're known to blacken the sun
as a cloud passes by the sun. They form these outrageous, it
is probably one of the largest
And even more interestingly, and midge emergence in the world.
researchers are very interested in in this system, is they're
cyclical. This is the year I was there,
and this was three years before it.
And this happens year in, year out.
It cycles.
five years, and they still don't Seven years, six years,
Of course while I was there I had to get a sweater, and so
here's me in the outrageous Icelandic sweater.
And, of course, lakes that are
which is the tiny, the very actually vsmall lakes. my heart,
This is a small lake. All these small lakes, all these
names, we've given them to them.
None of these small bog lakes These arehave names.al names.
But we call this Timber Bog, and
even half the size of this room. this is a small lake probably
If you put three canoes end on That's a canoe.
lake. endAnd this is in northern the
Wisconsin, and there are
They are everywhere. millions of these out there.
numbers. There is absolutely huge
of the interesting research in And this is really where a lot
big lakes we know a lot about. global limnology lies because
we have good idea of what it is. We can go once to a big lake and
something like a thousand to two And there are, potentially,
kilometers in the world. thousand lakes over ten square
later, there are absolutely Bmillions of these, and they'ree
much harder to understand.
are all part of the Global Lake Ecological Observatory Network.s
These have all been, in one way or another, studied by
colleagues in our group.
group is data sharing, expertise One of the central tenets of the
The idea is that, as with lakes and with lake researchers, we
have to combine our efforts, our
answer bigger questions in the resources, and our data to
And this is actually a fairly outdated map.
There are a lot more groups that
around the world. I bring up, so, as I said, a lot
of where I started was in buoy
buoys, and so, in some way, my work, building instrumented
before I started my graduate kind of capstone project of that
bit more about, was the work, wprofiling buoy.a little
This was a buoy we built to take
would sense things like achlorophyll, blue-green algae,t
and index of blue-green algae,
and it would raise it and lower temit in the water column.gen,
And this is much easier said
You have a contraption to raise and lower something and then you
have waves and then you make it solar powered and then things
grow on it and it's definitely
But a good friend of mine, an engineering challenge.
unfortunately not here tonight, but him and I decided to take on
this challenge and build it.
of the Wisconsin web page for this deployment in Lake Mendota.
We were all very proud of ourselves.
This here, as I said, this is Jordan.
This is myself. When we went to the front page
of the Wisconsin website, I was mentioned and Jordan's legs were
on the front of the website.
going for, but it was still very It wasn't quite what we were
So, you might be asking, what are these buoys doing?
I gave that example in Taiwan a buoy can help you see what
happens to this typhoon.
and interesting systems. But lakes are extremely dynamic
get a much closer view of what's With these sensing platforms we
biologically in the lake, and goihere's an example.nd
This is Lake Mendota and Mendota
pretty windy out there and it ican do really crazy things.ts
So what you're actually seeing
temperature profile, and, as I here, up above this is that
generally very warm. said, this surface water is
We were having some sensor Ignore these blips.
This is the surface water. difficulties at this time.
very cold. These are deep waters that are
wind event. This is very strong winds coming
into Madison a single direction.
take this cold water which is more dense in this warm water on
the top and they actually push
It sloshes the lake to one side because there's so much force to
one direction on the lake.
these buoys. You can actually see that with
recovers, you get these waves that continue to propagate
through the water column. We can also see, I'll say, how
the lakes breathe.
we need to do, we tend to take And just like we do, just like
dioxide. in oxygen and breathe out carbon
the same way only, of course, Nowthey also photosynthesize.ch
So they have an extra nuance
So you can actually see here's this.
northern Wisconsin. This is the lake breathing.n
When the sun comes out, photosynthetic organisms start
to photosynthesize. They take up CO2 and they
release oxygen. This oxygen is coming out into
the water.
oxygen in the water. We can see it in dissolved
decrease again. ASo then this is all the otherat
organisms, the fish, the
they need to survive overnight, this is them taking in oxygen
just like we do.
moments ago. Here's Mendota actually just
before I came. I regenerated this graph just
there's a lot of interactions Youthat are very complex withand
physics and the movement of water, but on a good day you can
see a strong increase during the
night. day and then a decrease at
Strong increase, strong There's a decrease. day again.
We can see that as it happens.
actually the water heating up because warmer water holds less
dissolved gas.
heating up these last few days So this is actually the water
of. It's been hot and the water has
warmed up accordingly.
as I said. So, this is my story of course,
some work during the summer. I started undergrad here doing
I got involved with GLEON all, I I got to do this buoy work.
adviser and the people at the haCenter for Limnology.my
What did this do? Well, this work really broadened
my perspective on the world.
own, lakes I never thought I'd I saw lakes that were unlike our
that I would have never experienced otherwise, and this
is just a map of some of the
through on my own or via work that I'm quite proud of except
for the fact that at this scale it's not very impressive.
[LAUGHTER]
like you'd think it would. Europe just doesn't pop out
my grad degree then, I wanted to And so coming back and starting
I wanted to take a bigger perspective on lakes in the
world, and this was, as I said, I did a lot of software
development, actually, as an
back time and time again. I've used my ability to programe
and to develop software to
and myself can use. This is an online tool we call
Lakebase. The goal of this tool is to
index every lake in the world and collect any information we
might have about it.
of upwards of right now I think S10 million lakes in the worldn
and any information we have about those lakes.
You can just see this is, again,
that is centered on our Trout a shLake Field Station.onsin
These are lakes in the area, and
So there's a lot of lakes. each point is a lake.
As I said, lakes breathe And why do we care?
we release carbon dioxide. and we take in oxygen,
the same thing. They're releasing oxygen, taking
in carbon dioxide during the
At night they're taking in day.
dioxide. oxygen and releasing carbon
world, and they're part of this Abig global cycle of carbon.he
And here, of course, is a fairly
have probably seen a figure like classic, I'm sure many of you
This is showing carbon dioxide this before.
atmosphere, or sorry, this is temperature, this is global
temperature.
at in terms of climate change Buand global warming due toing
increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
And the big question here, and I
historical perspective that some have to say I don't have the
but this challenge in recent of the older scientists do have,
going on has really opened up a world of science that has said,
whoa, we don't know how this
We don't know where all this works.
it's coming from and how these carbon is going to and where
the soil, that put carbon into processes that put carbon into
how these work. oil,We don't know the rates.now
We don't understand the sensitivities.
We don't necessarily know with a
going to happen. high degree of certainty what's
growing area of research, and you'll see it for, I'm sure, the
next many decades still.
in lakes. BYou'll notice this is a veryd
classic carbon cycle figure.
water cycles only this is the movement of carbon through the
ecosystem.
people outputting carbon, we So we have fossil fuels, we have
the atmosphere, we have it going have carbon that's sitting in
This is the ocean portion. into trees, into the soil.
into the ocean, where's it going We're saying how much is going
Whenever carbon goes into the ocean, some of it might make it
to the ocean floor and kind of
or some of it might get thrown disappear for a period of time,
There's a lot of variables here. back out into the atmosphere.
things going on at once. There's a lot of different
figure doesn't have lakes, and If you'll notice, though, this
rivers. There's a small term here that's
going to forests or something,
of this river. and there's nothing coming out
probably missing something. When we focus only on the ocean,
on grasslands, and on forests and on human impact, we're
probably missing some big pieces
Lakes are small, very productive of this puzzle.
lot of questions this brings up. environments, and so there's a
How much carbon are they What kind of role do lakes play?
Or are they releasing excess bringing in?
Are they taking carbon from this carbon?
forests and are they putting it back out in the atmosphere?o
We call that net heterotrophy.
carbon dioxide? Many questions and we have onlyr
a few answers.
lakes, and there's even more As I said, there's a lot of big
What do these small lakes do? How much do we even know about
these small lakes?
have never been visited by a Many of them, millions of them
Many of them we don't even know basic numbers about them.
Many of them are actually too small to see by satellite
imagery.
And of course you can make the We'll see that here in a bit.
Ocean is 71% of the Earth's csurface area..
Land is something like 28%. And then lakes and rivers are
probably around 1%. You say, okay, well, 1% isn't a
very big number.
But they probably do. The ocean, while it covers a
really big portion of the world,
much. a lAnd they call this oceaning
productivity map. And this is based on satellite
imagery.
they're trying to measure the amount of chlorophyll that's in
the water.
the red zones are hot. So what you're seeing here is
chlorophyll, there's a lot of Tproductivity, there's a lot off
biological activity in the
The areas where it's blue and purple, it's very low.
The ocean, in many regions, is a
There can episodic events where they get slightly higher
concentrations, but there's very
much, much of the ocean. little going on in much, much,
the ocean purely as being 71% of So we can't really think about
It's not just how much surface the Earth's surface area.
you're doing with that surface area you have, it's also what
And the ocean, for a large part, area.
Now, of course, the ocean is in many parts is not much.
I'm not trying to downplay the huge.
It's a very big part of this. But it's not necessarily as big
as one might think. So what role do lakes play in
this grand scheme?
here and tell you and answer. And I'm nI apologize.come out
This is an ongoing area of
This is something that some people have made some estimates
on, but we are still struggling with some actually very
fundamental questions that get
about this. aBut one of the things that were
first need to know to answer
lakes do we have? wHow much surface area is therey
in lakes? How much volume is there in
lakes?
How much photosynthesis is going How productive are they?
Are they sources or are they on in them?
There's a lot of questions that are bound up on this.
And something that I've been
to this, something I've been researching then, I'll come back
this in a bit, I've been researching, and I'll get into
out how we can understand the number of lakes and the surfacee
area of lakes on the globe. And why do we need to know this?
Well, we need to figure out a way to start to estimate these
very important things at broad
We need to figure out, okay, scales.
are doing, well let's figure out well if we don't know what lakes
then multiply it times the what one lake might be doing and
Well, we can't exactly do that number of lakes.
and there are big lakes and then because there are small lakes
lakes. there are really, really big
come out super well, but this is Here's a figure that doesn't
this is the surface area of Lake the surface area of Lake Baikal,
are of Trout Bog. And, actually, on a log scale in
square meters, Baikal is closer to the surface area of the Earth
than it is to the surface area
So lakes span a huge gradient. of some of the small lakes.
outline here is Baikal, and this This is actually, this faded
to give you an idea of the scale small dot here is Mendota, just
So, how do we look at this? How do we start to take this
weird collection of big lakes and small lakes and medium size
lakes and start to make sense of
Well, a researcher named, very it?
named Robert Wetzel, Bob Wetzel, famous researcher in limnology
the idea of just looking at in 19patterns in lake size.posed
And he took a very simple look
look at each lake area size aclass of lakes, so lakes thats
are a thousand square kilometers, a hundred, ten, so
on and so forth, and let's look at how many of those lakes there
are.
drew up. Now, this is a figure he kind of
but he theorized based on what This is a theoretical figure,
found at that time that this he knew and based on what he
This is what's commonly known as followed a regular pattern.
thinking about spatial a power law, or if we're
fractal process which means that statistics it's often called a
the number of a big thing, if you know there are 10 lakes that
are 1,000 square kilometers,
as many lakes that are 100 then there's probably 10 times
And there's probably 10 times as many lakes then that are
10 square kilometers. And you can start to make this
kind of assumption of a process of a model and use it to
estimate globally.
lakes, and we'll see here in a We can count the number of large
And this actually hinges on a very cool thing, a very cool
kind of fractal nature of geology, fractal nature of the
universe. Let's not say the universe but
geology on Earth. And you can take, actually, a
very simple process that scales many sizes, it can act on
inches, on kilometers, on miles,
theoretical surface, like this and if you create this fractal
This is a theoretical fractal osurface that I've created.
If you take this and you just pretend, let's say you dump
water on this.
the computer. OIt would not be good for the
computer. But you can theoretically dump
water on it, and you can see
Where do they pool? And what you get is a surface
that looks like this here.
and, just as we did here before, And actually then, if you take
at each size, then you get this if you plrelationship. of lakes
This is size and this is the
This very linear relationship again that each time you go up
in size class, you get 10, you
lakes. get a known number more of these
okay, if we know this and we So we can go on and we can say,
the large lakes from space, they're fairly easy to identify,
there's not many of them, and this was work done where
they indexed, they took satellite imagery, and they
looked at all of the large lakes
the world, and they released and all of the large wetlands in
And if you take this portion of the large lakes you have, you
can see here it actually only goes down to 10 square
kilometers which is just a bit
and you then extrapolate out, unyou go out this knowing that,
relationship is steady into the small lake size classes, you can
start to estimate how many lakes
And I wouldn't be a researcher there are in the world.
about some literature. up here talking unless I talked
paper that was published, and Sothis gets cited all over thel
world.
He's actually a researcher in Iowa, I think Iowa State, I
forget exactly, and he then estimated from this relationship
how many lakes there are in the world.
And he said a lake stopped at a 10th of a hectare which is 100
square meters which is not very big.
It's probably a tad bigger or it's a tad smaller than this
room. If you think about 10 meters on
a side, that would be 100 square
So that's the cutoff. No, I did that wrong.
Sorry.
1,000 square meters. Sorry, a 10th of a hectare is
something like that. So 23 meters on a side,
class. So it's not a very big site
were something like 304 million Nonethlakes in the world. there
And the vast, vast, vast
way this relationship works, the majority of that, because of the
small, small, small lakes like vast majority of those are
talking. those little bog lakes I was
like that. Like your backyard pond, things
his was all theoretical. So my work then I wanted to see,
said, okay, theoretically, how He took that relationship and
I took a recently released data mset from the United Stated.
Geologic Survey, and I have to
data sets. commend them on their phenomenal
in terms of understanding how the water and the land resources
in a country, the US has done a phenomenal job and much of it
has been done by the USGS.
set that they had released, extracted all the lakes from it,
and then started looking at what
we have in the US. kind of distributions of lakes
You can see the darker the red It's actually very revealing.
lakes. colors are a high abundance of
of lakes, if not zero. The blue is much lower abundance
very few, not surprising. AnBut, actually, this southerns
central Midwestern region really
There's a lot of lakes in this pops out.
Now, it turns out, though, we have to be careful because just
the number of lakes, as I said, number isn't everything.
The abundance is deceiving. These lakes in the Midwest here
are small, small agricultural ponds.
Millions of agricultural ponds
livestock and things like that. If you look at the surface area,
the percentage of surface area
completely different. that'I can show you again. looks
Here you can't even see the Northwoods of Wisconsin, and
Minnesota looks a little hot but
lakes. not really like there's a lot of
this northern lake region really But here, again, you can see
Minnesota, again, really pops out.
you see hundreds and thousands striking and even further west
Florida, actually surprisingly, I have to admit I have probably
a Wisconsin bias, but Florida is
well. an exAnd of course Alaska.ion as
That is something that has been known for a long time.
But one of the incredible statistics that came out of this
then is that looking at this, if
say, okay, how many lakes are in you break it up by state, if you
million and Alaska has around a a state, Tmillion. around a
But, again, in Texas, this is this region here, there's this
agricultural pond building, and in reality, the actual surface
area in Texas is much lower.
total surface area lakes in the world, then Texas doesn't pope
out quite as much.
So, Downing had said, okay, it Now, back to that relationship.
through into small size classes. goes straight on all the way
looking at the actual data set This is the work, this is
this blue line is the line that Downing et al basically used in
their results.
basically look like a thick black line, that's the actualt
data set. That's the observed lakes in the
US. And you can see it doesn't quite
make it quite as high as Downing
And on top of that, it starts to had originally estimated.
classes. deviate away in these small size
Now, that straight line makes sense in the fractal world like.
I talked about, but it's not
deviate this line downwards. clear yet what's going on to
working on right now as part of my PhD thesis, and there's a lot
of potential issues.
these lakes. We might just not be seeing
satellite imagery is not They're very small, and
areas and things like that. You don't always get great shots
of these lakes. We may not be hitting them all.
These small lakes, they're very small.
They may just evaporating.
potential for the lake to exist but they may just be evaporating
away and not actually existing. They may not have enough water
supply to keep them in
And then in this large size class I just highlighted, this
is a known issue. This is kind of the idea that
we're simply not on an infinite plane so we can't have infinite
sized lakes.
out further, but we are Iconstrained to the size of the
world.
synopsis, the original estimate said in the US there would be,
say, 20 million lakes.
My estimate based on the work that we've done says probably
about 10 million, but of course because that change in the
number is up here in the very small lakes, as I said there's a
lot of small lakes and a
lakes, it doesn't really change the amount of surface area a
whole lot in our understanding. So that's something to kind of
take away.
be interested in, unfortunately AnothMinnesota still wins.might
Even if you look at all of the
the lakes in Minnesota, Minnesota wins both in number
and they have about the twice the surface area as us too.
So we can leave that to rest. There's no way.
There's been lots of debates. It depends on if you look at
named lakes or unnamed lakes, but either way they,
unfortunately, win. Yeah, so this is kind of where
my research is sitting right
scale. now, taking a look at broader
kind of more, use more of a Ththeoretical underpinning.and
What does this huge scaling of
the size of the state of lakes, these lakes go from being
to the size of this room, what Wisconsin almost in Lake Baikal
The lakes of this huge magnitude does this mean?
the same way that a small lake can't operate and can't behave
about our understanding of lakes does, and what can that tell us
Another area I'm looking at is as is?
surface area. Historically in our field, we've
looked at the surface area of the lake and we've added it up
and we've said that two small lakes kind of means the same
thing as one big lake and so on and so forth.
But a lake is also its volume.
Things fall into the lake across A lake is also its perimeter.
and things make their way into its perimeter, carbon and leaves
The volume of the lake has the lake.
it has thermal processes, the pthermal mass of the lake isnd
dependent on its volume, and of course then the area which we've
thought about a lot.
broad scales is part of my work But expandinalso.se notions to
And, of course, understanding and integrating these lakes into
global models.
understanding what they do when Uwe look at the globe, and so,
forth.
of mine is also direct public And lastlyengagement.l interest
It's why I'm here today.
I was more than happy to because Tom had asked me to present, and
is nothing without I've really learned that science
scientists in the past 20 years, communication, and I think that
phenomenal job with actually 30 years, have done a not
communicating what they know to direthe broader public.t and
And so I'm interested, I'm very looking forward to if there's
any questions after the talk
And I've been working also with programmers and, of course,
myself, as I've programmed, to
better outreach tools that can build more better websites and
however they want to be engaged engagewith the science. people
I'm really open to the ideas. But this is just an example.
This is an iPhone and Android application that you can get the
Lake Mendota buoy data from, and
with the sailors. itFor some reason they like toit
know what the wind is or
[LAUGHTER] something.
And, as I said, I've been dealing with the Lake Mendota.
buoy, and so I have been
If anybody's interested in the blogging.
running a buoy on a lake like Mendota, I'm happy to take any
questions or considerations in
And it's on the web if you want tto look..
There will be a link based on the Wednesday Nite at the Lab
website.
[APPLAUSE]