Ice loss, toxic algae blooms: Canadian study looks at Northern Hemisphere's warming lakes

Lakes in the Northern Hemisphere have been warming six times faster since 1992 than they were at any other time period in the past 100 years, a Canadian study suggests.

The study, entitled “Loss of Ice Cover, Shifting Phenology and More Extreme Events in Northern Hemisphere Lakes,” was published in the October issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences and led by York University in Ontario.

The most northern of the Great Lakes, Lake Superior, which spans the Canada-U.S. border was one of the fastest warming lakes, the study found, losing more than two months of ice cover since conditions started being recorded in 1857. Grand Traverse Bay in Lake Michigan had one of the fastest melting trends recorded, with the ice melting about 16 days earlier per century.

“We found that lakes are losing on average 17 days of ice cover per century. Alarmingly, what we found is that warming in the past 25 years, from 1992 to 2016, was six times faster than any other period in the last 100 years,” said study author and associate professor at York University Sapna Sharma in a release.

Some of the lakes studied in Canada were Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, Lake Simcoe, Lake Nipissing and Lake of Bays.