Rising salt levels threaten Twin Cities lakes by 2050 (too salty for fish to survive)

[NickB79]

http://www.startribune.com/rising-salt-levels-threaten-twin-cities-lakes-by-2050/419088124/

Many lakes around the Twin Cities are becoming so salty from winter road maintenance that, within three decades, they will no longer support native fish and plants.

The lakes were included in the first study of freshwater chloride contamination across the northern region of the country, an area that has one of the highest density of lakes on earth. The researchers found that lakes showed steadily rising concentrations of chloride even with just one percent impervious land cover around their perimeters.

The Twin Cities turned out to be among the saltiest.

“One of the most impacted areas is Minneapolis and St. Paul, where you have dozens of small lakes,” said Hilary Dugan, the lead researcher and a limnologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “The smaller the lake, the more easily you load it with salt.”

Fuck. One of my family's favorite passtimes in the summer is to fish from the shore or a dock.

[tazkcmo]

1. With respect to your family's recreation

I'm a tad more concerned about drinking water and for agricultural use.

[NickB79]

2. This is more centralized to urban areas, from the article

Not a lot of corn fields in downtown Minneapolis

As far as drinking water goes, I don't know if we actually draw all that much from urban lakes, or if we pull more from the Mississippi and from deeper groundwater reserves.

[tazkcmo]

4. Yes, I understand that.

Sorry I wasn't clearer. I meant that what you are experiencing there is apt to happen across the globe as sea levels rise. The contamination of our fresh bodies of water by salt water scares the crap out of me more than loss of land mass.

Thank you for your patience. Peace.

[emmadoggy]

3. Oh, crap.

Hope they can figure out a solution.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

5. Salt from icy roads is contaminating North Americas lakes

Salt from icy roads is contaminating North America’s lakes

By Ben Guarino April 10

In the 1940s, Americans found a new way to love salt. Not simply for sprinkling on food — we’d acquired a taste for the mineral long before that — but for spreading on roads and sidewalks. Salt became a go-to method to de-ice frozen pavement.

During the past half-century, annual U.S. sales of road salt grew from 160,000 tons to about 20 million tons, as a group of environmental scientists pointed out in a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of the Sciences. NaCl kept roads free from slippery ice, but it also changed the nature of North America's freshwater lakes. Of 371 lakes reviewed in the new study, 44 percent showed signs of long-term salinization.

Extrapolating that finding for all of North America, at least 7,770 lakes are at risk of elevated salt levels — a likely underestimate, the researchers said.

Theirs is the first study of freshwater lakes on a continental scope. “No one has tried to understand the scale of this problem across the continent in the Northeast and Midwest, where people apply road salt,” said study co-author Hilary Dugan, a University of Wisconsin-Madison freshwater expert.
....

Ben Guarino writes for The Washington Post’s Speaking of Science section. Follow @bbguari