The Lake Champlain Sea Grant’s research ship is offering educational trips on the New York side of the lake for the first time. WAMC’s North Country Bureau Chief Pat Bradley boarded the first citizen science excursion from Plattsburgh on Tuesday.
The hybrid electric Marcelle Melosira is based in Burlington and has been offering educational trips on the lake from its Burlington port. The Lake Champlain Sea Grant partners with both the University of Vermont and SUNY Plattsburgh to conduct lake research, and this is the first time the hybrid vessel has traveled to the Plattsburgh Marina.
The boat left on route to Valcour Island. During the first portion of the trip, passengers remained in the classroom/laboratory. Lake Champlain Sea Grant Water Resources Outreach Specialist Aude Lochet offered an overview of the history, geology and ecology of the lake and its basin.
“Originally it was salt water. But over time with rain and snow the salt water got diluted into fresh water giving birth to Lake Champlain as we know it today. So here is Lake Champlain what it looks like now, but when it was the Champlain Sea it was much wider, much bigger. And the shape of Lake Champlain now is really a testimony of when the glacier retreated so many thousand years ago,” Lochet explains.
Off shore of Valcour Island, the Marcelle Melosira comes to a stop.
Lake Champlain Sea Grant Watershed and Lake Education Coordinator Ashley Eaton is on the back deck next to a large circular piece of equipment called the Rosette Sampler that was obtained about two weeks ago.
“This piece of equipment goes down. As it’s going down it’s mapping the temperature. It’s mapping conductivity which is a proxy kind of like for salinity. It’s measuring ph. It’s measuring light. It’s measuring dissolved oxygen. And so basically you’re getting a lot of high frequency data about what’s happening in this exact moment on the lake. So how this works is basically the computer, everyone keep your hands clear of this, triggers this,” Eaton flips a switch. “It releases that. It releases this on the bottom and the bottle is now closed. And so this way you could sample basically like bottles every five meters. You could measure at the surface, at the bottom and bring that water quickly back on deck and then process it.”
The passengers are then divided into two groups to conduct citizen science experiments.
One group takes a black and white disc, called a Secchi disk, attached to a tape measure and drops it over the side. Eaton explains how it measures clarity.
“The way the disc is designed with the black and white, the concept is that you can lower this down. There’s a weight on the bottom and you can measure how far the disk goes down until you can’t see it anymore. And it also gives you some really valuable information when you’re looking at it. When you’re looking at the white the disk might look a little green. It might look a little brown and that’s going to tell you a little bit about what’s happening in the water column.” Eaton then instruct the folks, “One partner is going to be responsible for the reel and one partner is going to be responsible for just guiding and lowering this down and looking. You’re going to lower the Secchi disk until you cannot see it and then you’re going to bring it up just a little bit until you can just kind of see it. We’re looking for that kind of like sweet spot where the Secchi kind of disappears.”
The water is a bit choppy and Richard Robbins and his grandson Evan Beech have a few problems lowering the disc, eventually switching to the other side of the vessel to take their measurements.
“Keep it like that, like that,” Beech tells his grandfather.
Eaton comes by and asks, “Are they still going under the boat?’
But Evan Beach is focused on the disk into the water. “Okay. I can’t see it anymore.”
“You going to pull it out there?” asks Robbins.
“Alright I think I see it,” Beech says and Robbins decides “I’m going to reel it in.”
Meanwhile the second group has dropped what resembles a miniature weather balloon with a collector cup on the bottom into the lake. Several drops are placed on slides to observe algae and plankton under the on-board microscopes.
“I can’t believe we swim in that. That’s so weird.”
11-year-old Aksel Mastrosguiseppe was fascinated by what he was seeing.
“It’s very cool and you’re not expecting that. You’re not ready for what they show you. It’s incredible,” Mastrosguiseppe said. “In the water sample I knew a bit of tiny creatures but not as much as that. I thought like a few but that’s a lot. And that’s just a small quantity. It’s like three to five drops of water. They move like they were creatures. They are creatures! But I was not expecting them to move that fast and there’s a lot.”
The Sea Grant scientists also passed around vials of microplastics that are being found in the lake and said they are formulating research projects to determine the extent of that type of pollution and the problems it causes in Lake Champlain.
