Mikayla Rehfus
MSED 252
How Water Shaped Michigan The Mitten, Water Winter Wonderland, Lady of the Lake, The Peninsula State, and The Great Lake State are just a handful of the nicknames given to the beautiful state of Michigan. Taking a closer look, most of these nicknames have something in common: water. The word Michigan even comes from the Ojibwa word mishigamaa, meaning "great lake" or "large lake". Why is water so important to Michigan? Water, in various forms, is responsible for the unique shape of the state. Glaciers, man-made structures, and rivers and lakes have all played a part in shaping Michigan. Over one million years ago, in the Ice Age, the features of what is now Michigan began to form. Much of the Midwest was formed
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Dams have been put in Michigan for multiple reasons. Dams provide flood control, debris control, hold mine waste, and produce hydropower. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, mine tailings, waste dams, are fairly common. In areas like Negaunee and Copper Harbor, reuse ponds and trailings basins can be seen on satellites. Trailings basins and reuse ponds use dams to keep the water constrained. This satellite image of Negaunee, Michigan, taken September 11, 2013, shows the magnetite and hematite ore …show more content…
May 7, 1954 construction began on the Mackinac Bridge. The bridge was to connect the lower and upper peninsulas of Michigan on a $99,800,000 budget. Construction of the bridge took a little over three years, opening November 1st, 1957, but maintenance still happens daily. The construction of the fourth largest suspension bridge in the world made it easier for people to travel from the Upper Peninsula to the Lower Peninsula, shaping Michigan economically. The construction of breakwaters, groins, and piers can also shape Michigan. Breakwaters are put in place to protect the shore from large waves. When breakwaters and groins are in place, sediment can not be deposited in the places that it would be normally because the structures are interfering with the natural movement of the water. This leads to an excessive amount of sand in other
The one feature common to the Hoover Dam, The Mississippi river and the three gorges dam is that they all tried to control nature’s swings, specifically in the form of flooding. Before the Hoover dam was built, the Colorado river “used to flood spectacularly…but after 1900 the Colorado provoked a vehement response” (Pg 177). The response was simple, but large. The U.S. built several large dams, including the Hoover dam, on the Colorado to decrease its flooding and increase power and irrigation. Unfortunately, just as human control of the Colorado’s flooding increased, its organisms and habitats were detrimentally influenced, and the water became more and more salinated.
The original Huron settlement was located between Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe in the southern part of Ontario (1). The tribe was discovered by the French in the year 1610 and the French described the group as the most prosperous native group they had discovered along the St. Lawrence River (1). As it turns out, The Huron actually called themselves Wendat, which means “Dwellers on a Peninsula” (12). The word Huron was given to the group by the French and because the word meant a boar or a hillbilly, the group was offended and did not adopt the name (12). Eventually the Huron were forced to sell their land by the US government in the 1800s. Today, the Huron have reserves in Kansas and Oklahoma as well as Quebec, Canada (Internet Research). Numerous connections could be made between the Huron and the topics we have talked about throughout the semester. The five connections that were talked about most in the book include: horticulture, religion and rituals, kinship and marriage practices, gender role ideol...
Two Eco-regions divide The Foundry; most of it is composed of the Eastern Temperate Forest, whereas a smaller area is part of the Northern Forests. The Northern Forests, which contains a smaller portion of The Foundry, consists of the Upper Peninsula and half of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan and also ...
Mississippi is known for a lot of things including their crops, it can also be found as the Home of Confederate and, the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians has made many of the states traditions. The people, places and, events tell the story of Mississippi. The Modern History of Mississippi has made it the beautiful and popular state it is today.
The Hoover Dam turbines provide a great amount of electricity to those living in the states of California, Arizona, and Nevada. The water level of Lake Mead currently affects the dam’s ability to provide power from the large sized turbines. When the water level of Lake Mead goes down from conditions affecting it, the dam’s ability to provide power directly affects the power companies supplying consumers. Fortunately, the water levels gained back some of that full amount while still shy of where it once existed. As stated, “But the increased elevation isn’t enough to reopen any of the four boat launch ramps closed in the past decade, Holland said” (Shine, C., 2011, para. 9). This definitely indicates that there is currently promise to recovering with close to the original levels even though it may not be excessively soon.
A third intake pipe was added by SNWA in September 2015 beneath Lake Mead in order to provide drinking water to southern Nevada residents (“Third,” n.d.; Tracy, 2015; “Nevada,” 2016). In 2016 the construction of a “low lake level pumping station” began and is meant to be finished by 2020, in addition to this project new reservoirs are being sought (“Low,” n.d.; “Nevada,” 2016). The plan of the SNWA appears to be to continue pumping and searching for new water resources, it would seem that the water supply problem has not been
While some might say that Lake Bonneville seems like “forever ago,” it is actually a really young feature. With the Lake mainly forming and flooding around 20,000 years ago it’s not even scraping the surface of the forever ago that the earth was even formed into what we know today. Even mammals and the human race has only been on the planet for a blink of an eye in the earth’s relative history. With the best knowledge adn research dating the earth to 4.5 billion years the Flood’s actual stamp on the timeline would be much much closer then we would think. Not only did Lake Bonnevile create some beautiful geography, it also left strong, powerful scars in the form of river terraces and shorelines giving us a good glimpse into the physical histroy of the region.
Originally the land itself was swampland, created by the retreating Wisconsian glacier, over 10,000 years ago, and was given the name “The Big Swamp” by Native Americans living around it. In the early 1800s as canals became increasingly popular as a means of transporting goods a canal system was proposed to link the Ohio and Erie canals. A hefty supply of water was needed to keep the water levels up enough for them to be actually usable, so they came up with the idea of creating five “feeder lakes” to accomplish this. Buckeye Lake was one of these five and the marshland was dammed up and filled with water in the mid 1800s.
The water supply of Florida is important for a number of reasons. But it is crucial because it not only helped develop human society but it is also continually sustaining it. There are a number of phases and processes that take place to make this happen.
Dams made from dirt are very weak and the South Fork dam was built entirely with dirt. From an engineering standpoint dams made with dirt needed to be built ...
As global temperatures and ocean levels rise, the water levels of the Great Lakes continues to fall. As the lakes hit their all time lowest level in global history in 2012, society remains ignorant to the imposing doom that lurks ahead. Since the Great Lakes make up the largest group of fresh water lakes on Earth and are responsible for approximately 21% of the Earth’s fresh water supply, this issue is becoming one of the largest environmental and economical issues our modern world faces. The effects of this issue include destroying animal habitats and a major economic market; shipping. Water levels in the Great Lakes have been dropping for the past fourteen years, but it wasn’t until boats were scraping the bottom of Lake Huron that people began to take notice. This terrible environmental issue has been dubbed a long term cycle of over evaporation and not enough precipitation to replenish the Lakes. Keith Kompoltowicz, chief of watershed hydrology for the United States Army Corps of Engineers in Detroit has been monitoring this issue for a decade and has made startling discoveries, such as in 2012, he discovered Lake Michigan and Lake Huron’s water levels only rose four inches after winter, whereas the Lakes have been regularly recorded as gaining a foot of water after the winter season had ended. This amount of water added is not enough to maintain a proper water level during the dry, hot summer seasons that evaporate much water from the Great Lakes. While some scientists say that this is just a cycle that will adjust itself naturally, most experts that have been studying this phenomenon, such as Kompoltwicz, would agree that the issue has gone to far
Michigan touches four of the five Great Lakes--Erie, Huron, Michigan, and Superior. The state's 3,288-mile (5,292-kilometer) shoreline is longer than that of any other state except Alaska. Michigan consists of two separate land areas, called the Upper Peninsula and the Lower Peninsula. The two peninsulas are connected by the Mackinac Bridge, which spans 5 miles (8 kilometers) across the Straits of Mackinac.
The Elitsac Manufacturing Company Dam affects 14.08 miles of Wolf Creek (Fish, n.d.). The original purpose of this dam is not documented within the state’s dam inventory, and it is also no longer in service (Dam, n.d.). Another dam on Wolf Creek is Hopkins Mill Dam, which also is out of service. The Hopkins Mill Dam was originally built to generate hydroelectric power and affects 46.58 miles of river (Fish, n.d.).
Red Lake, Minnesota is an Ojibwa place-name. The area dates back 9000 yeas ago when the Stone Age peoples first inhabited the region that is now known as northwestern Ontario. These aboriginals were indigenous people familiar with the properties of the surrounding plants and wild animals. They lived along the waterways and treated their environment with respect and celebrated its bounties through their spirituality. (Web Site #1)
I had the pleasure of kayaking about fifteen miles of the Arkansas river, in Colorado, this summer. Flowing from its headwaters near Buena Vista, the Arkansas is a virgin river. Only a trickle during the winter, "The Ark," is reborn every spring with the life bearing waters of fresh mountain snow melt. The greening of river valleys throughout Colorado occurs during the month of June, and traveling from the east I realized how vital the snowmelt waters are to life in the western United States. Without water, something which we take for granted even in brutal summers, life in the west is a struggle.