John DeTuncq, “Exploring Wind’s Influence on Nutrient Stratification”
Mentor: Russel Cuhel and Carmen Aguliar, Freshwater Sciences
Poster #43
When in the Summer and Fall months around Lake Michigan, one might find swarms of people on the beach, or swimming in the lake. Surely the entire lake does not completely warm to swimmable temperatures throughout the course of just a few months of warm weather? No. Freshwater bodies, specifically Lake Michigan, is a first class exhibit of thermal stratification. In the scientific world, we can use this physical property to essentially track the flux of chemicals across defined layers, and this is crucial to know when trying to understand the Milwaukee Harbor, other coastal ecosystems, and even communities of microorganisms. However, this phenomenon is only seen half of the time, as in the winter the lake cools to a (roughly) uniform temperature. When a local water treatment plant found that the concentration of dissolved ions at an offshore pipe drastically increased during a time of no thermal stratification, we wanted to know why. Another key component which sometimes goes overlooked as being solely impacted is the atmosphere. As seen in the great upwelling of 2015, strong winds and winds of any kind will affect the way a body of water is mixed, and this is the center of my current research. Using local wind speed and direction patterns, we were able to deduce that coastal upwelling played a large role in the conductivity spike seen in the local water treatment pipe.