(water bubbling) (ethereal music) (ethereal music continues) (ethereal music continues) (ethereal music continues) (ethereal music continues) - [Karen] There's always something new to see in Lake Superior.

Just swimming at a new beach or going a little bit further down the beach in my training and seeing what's around that next corner.

I can find myself pretty far away from my towel before I'll turn around.

It's a resource and a wonder.

- [Interviewee] The river flows seamlessly out and becomes the lake.

And all of our rivers around Lake Superior become the lake.

- [Wayne] Gitchi-Gami.

The Fond du Lac people were known as Gitchi-Gami-Anini, the people of Lake Superior.

There's a spirit in the lake.

A lot of people feel that spirit.

The Anishinaabe realize that as well.

- [Karen] There's no place like Lake Superior.

It's just a beautiful, beautiful place and incredibly precious.

I think it's really important for everyone who comes to this lake to really understand how precious it is, how unique it is.

It carries 10% of the world's fresh water.

(waves crashing) And water is becoming the most precious resource there is.

(ethereal music continues) - [Interviewee] It's just so big and so cold and so pure.

This huge pool of fresh water.

It makes you pause, it makes you think.

It's just part of the soul of this region.

(water splashing) - I'm Karen Zemlin.

I'm a lifelong Minnesotan.

I started swimming in open water with my dad when I was 14, and we did a lot of swims together.

We started swimming in Lake Superior and when he was training to swim in the English Channel.

You have to train your body and your mind for open water, cold water swimming.

(light dramatic music) We're lucky to have such a big body of water for open water swimmers to train in.

- Woo!

- [Narrator] Karen and a team of five seasoned marathon swimmers devised a plan to attempt a distance record relay swim for Lake Superior in late August, 2023.

Their idea was to swim nonstop without wetsuits from Split Rock Lighthouse to Duluth.

The swimmers would swim one hour rotations over the 46 miles.

When not in the water, they would rest and warm up aboard the 68-foot Soulmates 2.

The 36-foot Imagine would lead the way with Paul Vogue in his kayak as a safety escort.

In preparation, they held a practice session in July.

- For today, our goal is to swim that shape of a box.

So there's three GPS coordinates.

- [Narrator] On the team with Karen was 62-year-old Jeff Everett, 64-year-old Craig Collins, 51-year-old Casey McGrath, 28-year-old Seth Batezold, and 57-year-old Mike Miller.

- We're no spring chickens here except Seth.

- [Karen] So they come with a lot of experience of their own and we're gonna lean into that.

- Super toasty in this wetsuit.

- [Narrator] On practice day, wetsuits were allowed; a luxury that the swimmers wouldn't have a month later.

- Today is a a good proof of concept that this time of year during this swim window at the end of August, that this is achievable.

It's a slow, subtle process, but it's getting warmer.

So we're one of those invasive species as the lake warms up, the open water swimmers.

- [Karen] This is the first long relay in Lake Superior.

In an event that's over 45 miles, it's substantial because we know how fast those conditions can change.

(light dramatic music) (light dramatic music continues) - [Reporter] Okay, ready?

- [Karen] Sure.

- Okay, so the day's here, how are you feeling right now?

- I'm super excited.

I think that the water is a great temperature.

I guess I didn't get a read on it.

I heard it was maybe 65 even.

So that's plenty warm.

Plenty warm.

- [Reporter] All right.

(horn blowing) (water splashing) (light dramatic music) (light dramatic music continues) - [Karen] Any big body of water, you have to invite its cooperation sometimes I think.

'Cause no matter what, it can win.

(light dramatic music continues) (light music) - [Narrator] We live on a blue planet.

Though 97% of the Earth's water is salt water, making up the world's oceans.

And it's not readily available for our use.

Only 3% is fresh water and only a third of that water is accessible.

Almost all of the rest is either frozen in glaciers or unreachable below ground.

That makes surface fresh water such a precious resource.

And among the world's freshwater lakes, Superior's vary name suggests how extraordinary it is.

It is the largest lake in the world by surface area.

It contains 84% of North America's surface fresh water reserves.

- Lake Superior is the greatest of the Great Lakes.

The Great Lakes watershed holds 20% of all the fresh surface water on the planet.

And Lake Superior alone holds 10% of all the fresh surface water on the planet.

It has enough volume or capacity to absorb the waters of all the other Great Lakes and still have room to spare.

It's truly a superlative, globally significant water body.

- The fact that we here in the middle of North America here in Duluth, Minnesota can look on our windows and see ships, which may have come from really anywhere on Earth, is a really remarkable thing.

- This is the largest freshwater port in the world.

Routinely moving goods across the globe out of the center of the United States to far flung countries in Europe.

They ship to Australia.

They ship to parts of Asia.

So it's really a remarkable connection for our people, but also to a global economy.

(boat horn blowing) (light music) - The thing about Lake Superior is it's just loaded with superlatives.

It's just so big, so vast, so beautiful.

It's the wildest of the Great Lakes.

It has the most wilderness-like shorelines.

And it is the one lake that people can visit and get a glimmer of what it might have been like to be here pre-European settlement.

It is the most intact of the Great Lakes ecosystems that we have here in North America.

(waves crashing) - [Narrator] In many ways, Superior is like an ocean, and while her power is nothing to be taken lightly, the lake can have a gentle side, especially in the warm summer months.

- There's something about Lake Superior that can connect with everybody, whether they like to swim in the lake or fish in the lake or kayak in the lake or boat in the lake.

(light music) I'm Katya Gordon.

I am a contented resident of Two Harbors, Minnesota.

I live there with my husband Mark and my two daughters, and we sail on Lake Superior.

We've had a charter sailing business since 2010.

We love to bring people to Lake Superior, learn how to sail and get more in touch with the the lake itself.

In 2014, we started taking young adults with us as crew on Lake Superior, visiting schools and doing educational programs about Lake Superior.

I love our rugged shoreline and all the drama that comes with that, but I also just love the sensation of leaving it behind.

The water is incredibly clear and there's just a little sound of the waves lapping on the hull of the boat, and it's incredibly peaceful.

- [Narrator] But as Katya and her family know well, Lake Superior's many moods include some that are fierce.

And the lake has very few safe harbors where you can ride out a storm.

Conditions can change in minutes, and huge swells build very quickly, much faster than on an ocean.

Some 600 ships have been lost to Lake Superior, and the biggest storms have sunk multiple ships.

The lake's frigid waters have made wrecks particularly deadly.

By one estimate, more than 1,000 lives have been lost.

(light eerie music) (waves crashing) (thunder booming) - In Lake Superior, the Great Panther, the guardian of the copper at Isle Royal has his lair underwater, and is always associated with water.

They used to have ceremonies to the Great Panther where they would make offerings and sink them to the Great Panther that was down under the water.

Because of course he controlled the storms.

So that if you are a commercial fisherman or just even traveling on Lake Superior, you did that in order to ensure safe travel.

You never take Lake Superior for granted.

You never trust it.

It can be dangerous, can be deadly.

(waves crashing) (static crackling) - After hearing a little more stories about the Great Lakes, (bells chiming) I always just thought it was really intriguing to think about that because I lived right next to Lake Superior.

(static crackling) And anytime that I was near it, I felt the power and the energy of the lake itself.

(bells chiming) In my mind, Mishi Bizhiw was a protector of the water.

Big giant cat, you know, sort of embodies that spirit.

Given that it's a protector of the water, to me that sort of makes it a little noble.

So even if it's presented in some stories as being kind of a menace, I see it as having its own story and its own reasoning.

One of the themes in my work is that I like to look at these characters at a different perspective and I want to frame the Mishi Bizhiw that it can be a parent to a cub.

- A lot of Ojibwe medicine bags have the image of the panther with a kind of zigzag line on top, meaning it's underwater.

And they show often two of them in two different colors.

So one panther is evil and can poison you, it can blow pestilence out of its mouth; kill you.

But the other one has all kinds of knowledge that if you give him the right gifts and the right honor, he'll give you all kinds of wisdom.

(drum beating) (Lilly singing in Ojibwe language) (singing in Ojibwe language continues) (singing in Ojibwe language continues) (singing in Ojibwe language continues) (singing in Ojibwe language continues) - [Wayne] Gitchi-gami-Ziibi.

That's what our name for the river is.

The river of the Great Lake.

And the bridge right over here is named after Bayaaswaa.

Bayaaswaa was a war chief of the Ojibwe who said, "You couldn't convince me to move anywhere else in the world.

This is the center of the universe for me."

And that pretty much summarizes what this area means to the Ojibwe.

- [Narrator] The river is also known as the St. Louis, the largest Lake Superior tributary in the United States.

And deep within the St. Louis estuary, where the river's nutrient-rich waters mix with those of the lake, there is an island of special importance to the Fond du Lac Band.

It's called Manidoo-minis, or Spirit Island.

- [Jeff] It's like the heart, the heart of a larger entity.

'Cause it's not just about the island.

It's about everything that comes out from that island.

The spirituality, the caretaking of the environment.

It's inseparable from each other.

The water flows, passed it the water.

That's the lifeblood of Mother Earth and lifeblood of the human race is that flowing water.

It flows by the heart like that.

It's going out into the greater world.

All that water flows by that heart, the island, and goes out into Lake Superior and through the other lakes and out into the ocean again.

(soft ethereal music) That's one of the reasons to that island is so important.

It isn't because it's just a piece of land, because it's a symbol and a center, a center of a culture and a center of a world.

And that's why it's important to us.

(soft ethereal music continues) (light music) - This whole area is part of the prophecies of where the Anishinaabe would live forever.

This would be our perpetual homeland was in these areas where the food grows on the water, the Manoomin, is relevant to all of us, all of us human beings.

If you look at the beauty of this estuary, all we need to do is be grateful for these surroundings in order for us to have a reciprocal relationship with all that provides for us.

- So when you're in the estuary, you're gonna see wetlands, forested islands, incredible bird diversity, waterfowl migrations that are really singular and important.

You're also gonna see a lot of mammal, reptile and amphibian diversity here too.

You get a sense that it's full of life.

The marine estuaries, or the estuaries on the saltwater coasts, have one big difference and that's salt.

But here we still have many chemical differences between Lake Superior and the St. Louis River, for example.

(water crashing) The St. Louis River comes down, it's warm, it's dark, it's nutrient-rich, it's flowing out of wetlands and forests, it's carrying a lot of nutrients and small sediment particles with it.

The lake is really clear, it's cold.

It doesn't have many different kinds of life in it because there's just not enough nutrients and energy to support that.

And so those two ecosystems are overlapping in the St. Louis River.

And that provides a space for all of these creatures in the lake, all of these creatures in the river to live together in a really productive place.

(light music) - People ask me how I got into it or wanted to get into it and I just say there's some crazy Nordic genes running around this body.

And I was always drawn to it.

My name's Stephen Dahl, I commercial fish out in Knife River on Lake Superior.

I've been doing this for 30 plus years.

(gulls cawing) I am up at 4:00 a.m. and you want to get out on the lake before the sun comes up.

It's a perishable product out there.

My herring net is about a mile and a half out and a mile and a half from the marina, give or take.

The herring nets are semi-permanent.

They're out there through the season.

It's an efficient system because you just go out there when this fish are around and lift one end of the net up, plop it over the bow, and then just slide along and pick the herring out.

And then the net goes right back in.

It's really nice 'cause you shut the motor off and it's quiet and it's just a world of herring gulls and me and water.

(gulls cawing) Knife River was, and still is a commercial fishing town and the rest of the towns up the shore are very much so.

First people that got here, they would get a chunk of land and then they would normally go, there aren't many harbors at all.

So they would build skids.

And again, that's why it was a skiff fishery.

They'd just push a homemade wood boat off the shore.

It's tough sometimes, but that's what they would do.

We can lift it, those herring nets in pretty stiff northwest wind 'cause it doesn't create a sea, it's just blowing off the shore.

And the biggest thing is you always go with the wind when you lift the net.

And it just shoots you right down the net.

So when you get to the outside of the net, you're done.

I never, never, never let go of that net until the motor started up and it sounds...

So everything sounds okay and then I drop it.

'Cause otherwise, if I have motor failure, I'm out in the middle of the lake within two, three minutes and I'm in trouble.

I just heard a story.

These guys, it hit and they couldn't roll back into it.

You know, this is 1900 or 1920.

They tied themselves into the boat 'cause they knew they were doomed, but at least people could find them frozen to death.

It actually really hasn't changed a lot.

We're not Luddites, but there's really no other way to do it.

There's not enough money in this system to warrant $500,000 boats.

I want to be out and it really is enjoyable to harvest a wild product.

I don't know, it's just something that gets into you.

You know, seeing a net come up full of fish is pretty enjoyable.

(horn blowing) (water splashing) - All right.

- Welcome.

- I thought it was good.

- Well done.

- I'm gonna take my goggles off.

Oh, so did everything go well here?

- [Swimmer] Yeah, 62, warming up to 64 recently.

- Yeah, no problem, you guys.

- [Swimmer] How so?

- If we could get a little sunshine it'd be like being at the beach.

If we get a little chop later, maybe it'll slow us down a little bit.

But right now this is, like, smooth sailing.

(upbeat music) - It feels good to get the butterflies out the first leg.

(water splashing) - This is Soulmates, we're calling Imagine.

- [Captain] Imagine, over.

- We are celebrating halfway by opening our candy bag.

We welcome you to open yours and enjoy.

- [Captain] Thank you.

Congratulations, everyone.

- Oh, thank you.

Halfway!

(swimmers cheering) (boat creaking) (indistinct talking) - Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

- You all right?

- [Karen] Yeah.

- [Narrator] In the afternoon, a tailwind kicked up with gusts greater than 20 knots.

The National Weather Service declared a small craft advisory that kept Paul Vogue and his kayak out of the water.

The waves grew to five feet and began pushing the sailboat ahead of the swimmers.

- It's looking pretty choppy to me.

So we'll see how it goes, man, you just don't fight it.

Don't fight the lake.

So, try and find a rhythm where you're in sync with what's going on and keep swimming.

(light dramatic music) I might feel like I'm in a washing machine, but I don't feel uncomfortable.

- [Narrator] As darkness approached, the wind and waves persisted.

Out of concern for the swimmer's safety, the captains began discussing the possibility of aborting the swim.

(light dramatic music continues) - Just a black abyss that you look down into.

You gotta pay attention and see everything.

See the boat and make sure you don't run into anything.

(horn blowing) - [Captain] Neutral, you're good to go.

(water splashing) Swimmer on deck.

- I gotta get some rest.

That was a long hour.

- [Swimmer] Yeah.

- Fatigue is settling in.

The air temperature is colder.

So the variables are, yeah, it's challenging now.

Pretty challenging.

(light dramatic music continues) (light dramatic music continues) (light music) - [Narrator] Lake Superior's unequaled legacy as famously frigid, clear and clean, does have a darker side.

Though the lands surrounding the lake remained largely undeveloped, and today have few sources of pollution, for 25 years, taconite tailings dumped into the lake by the Reserve Mining processing plant in Silver Bay, Minnesota, contaminated Superior's waters.

Public opposition and a lawsuit halted the practice in 1980.

Ballast water from oceangoing vessels introduced invasive species such as the sea lamprey, which reduced native fish populations.

Solutions were found to reduce those impacts too.

But today, the lake faces new challenges.

The increasing presence of microplastics, even on the most remote beaches, is one concern.

Even greater are the multiple effects of our warming climate.

Lake Superior is now one of the fastest warming of the world's largest lakes.

- Lake Superior is a remarkably cold lake compared to small lakes around it.

But also Lake Superior is significantly colder than the other Great Lakes.

It's actually a lot further north and sits in a much colder climate than the other Great Lakes.

The other really important aspect is that it's just really deep.

And so, in the spring when things are warming up, you have to warm up that entire bulk of the water and it just takes a very long time.

My name is Jay Austin.

I'm a professor at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

I work in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, but also here at the Large Lakes Observatory, which is a group of scientists on campus, all committed to developing a better understanding of how large lakes around the world function.

Winter conditions play a huge role in determining what happens the following summer, as much as whether we're having a warmer or cold summer.

Basically since about 1980, we've seen a dramatic increase compared to what happened the previous 80 years.

The lakes are four to five degrees Fahrenheit warmer now in the summer than they were 40 years ago.

And a lot of that is driven by the fact that we are having much milder winters, which means less ice.

And again, those winter conditions end up rolling forward into what happens in the summer.

And so it's a combination of milder winters and warmer summers that are causing surface temperatures to be measurably and statistically warmer now than they were 40 years ago.

(light music) (thunder rumbling) (rain pattering) - What we've seen under climate change is not only is the lake warming, but we're seeing an increase in large storm events.

In 2012, we had a 500 year storm event in Duluth, Minnesota.

Animals were swimming out of the zoo.

You had photos of people in kayaks at ATM machines.

Just extraordinary storm event that gutted the street system and broke different parts of the sewer system.

It was a really extraordinary storm event.

Then in 2016, just four years later, and 60 miles to the east along the south shore of Lake Superior, we have a 1,000 year storm event that strikes Ashton, Wisconsin.

Blew out federal highways, blew out all sorts of culverts and bridges throughout the area.

And then two years later, 2018, we have another 1,000 year storm event that hammers Ashland, Wisconsin again, and then stretches all the way to the upper peninsula of Michigan and pounds Houghton, Michigan, Hancock, Michigan.

And these storm events created sediment plumes that were so large that they're visible from space.

(light dramatic music) These are storms that are only supposed to happen every 500 years, only supposed to happen every 1000 years, because of their severity.

And the south shore of Lake Superior had three of them in six years.

We felt like we were seeing climate change right before our eyes.

(water rushing) (water bubbling) - [Narrator] The storm of 2012 also impacted the lake's ecology, causing the first documented appearance of a large harmful algae bloom.

- Algae are these very small organisms that live in water.

They're an important function of any food web, however they can grow in abundance.

And that's when you have an algae bloom.

So it's when you just have a really an explosion of growth.

You can see this when you look in, you know, a pond or a lake.

You see all this kind of scummy green looking water.

And so algae play an important function, but when they grow in abundance, they can actually become very problematic for the ecosystem in areas like Western Lake Erie that has a really strong agricultural presence.

And it's also a much shallower basin than Lake Superior.

You see these really extensive, really intense cyanobacterial blooms.

(light dramatic music) Lake Superior is not where you would typically see cyanobacterial blooms or algal blooms in general.

Anybody who's gone swimming in Lake Superior, even in the hottest months, knows it's still quite cold.

- We have been surprised in seeing blue-green algae blooms or cyanobacterial blooms in Lake Superior.

The first documented example was 2012.

- So following that storm, about 30 or so days afterwards, there was a massive algal bloom that appeared in the lake.

And nobody really knew what to make of this.

We thought, gosh, that's really crazy.

It's kind of a one-off thing, but weren't thinking this is a problem in Lake Superior.

It was probably related to this crazy storm and that shouldn't be happening again.

And then in 2018, once again, we had one of these really, really large flood events.

And then we had a cyanobacterial bloom that stretched hundreds and hundreds of meters along the shoreline and went more than a kilometer offshore.

And so it seems that this is becoming a more prevalent thing.

In years where we have blooms no matter what the size are, there are warm temperatures for long periods or essentially like a longer growing season.

And in years where you also have these big flood events and more nutrients, that's when you get really big blooms.

- We're seeing cyanobacterial blooms in big, beautiful Lake Superior.

It's a huge scientific surprise and a mystery.

- [Narrator] The mystery is that most Lake Superior algal blooms aren't appearing where scientists expect to see them.

The nutrients that feed algal blooms typically come from agricultural and urban runoff.

And the south shore locations where the blooms have been most evident have little of either.

Solving the mystery of what's causing Lake Superior's algal blooms has become a priority for scientists with the Environmental Protection Agency.

(light music) (water splashing) (light music continues) (light music continues) - This is the Lake Explorer II that we're on today on our way to Bayfield and the Apostle Islands, we've been interested in Lake Superior with these occurrence of occasional occurrences of algae blooms along the south shore.

We're trying to be ahead of the curve and really get this baseline data now before maybe future blooms develop.

So on the back deck, we'll lower down a device we call a CTD Rosette.

And it collects water at different depths through the water column and it has some sensors on board that helps us characterize the plankton community.

And we can look at the different types of algae that are there.

- Here we have an opportunity to really get at the beginning of a problem in Lake Superior because we are just starting to have blooms, we have fairly clean water.

We can kind of look at what's changing along with the change in the frequency of blooms.

So the initial hypothesis is it has to do something with rainfall coming off the landscape through the tributaries and out to Lake Superior.

Whether it's bringing in the organisms off the landscape, cyanobacteria are all over, they're prevalent.

So are these streams bringing those organisms into Lake Superior?

Are they bringing in nutrients?

Are they bringing in warmer waters?

'Cause as the landscapes warm up, the water coming off of that also warms up.

Which of these factors could that be?

(light dramatic music) (light dramatic music continues) - I am on board to help with the glider work, and we'll be deploying our autonomous underwater glider, probably outside the Flag River, near Port Wing, Wisconsin this morning.

With the sensors that are on the glider, we can cross compare what the glider is detecting and what we've sampled from the CTD Rosette.

It's where the glider really is a useful device.

We can put it out for long periods of time.

We don't have to have a shipping crew.

We can come back at the end of the mission, pick the glider up, go through all the data that's been collected continuously while it's been out.

(light music) (light music continues) (water splashing) (light music continues) If a bloom occurs, we'll try to fly into it.

Try to measure the extent of the bloom, both horizontally and then vertically with the glider.

The glider collects data just about every second.

So it's a huge amount of data that we're collecting in this area to help us better understand the conditions that might be leading up to these blooms when they do occur.

- [Narrator] While EPA researchers explore the origins of Superior's algal blooms, others are studying the impacts of climate change on the lake's fish populations.

Clues are being found under the ice.

- When you step out on a lake in winter, it's dead quiet.

The snow is completely decking the entire lake.

And you think, okay, if it's quiet up here, it's gotta be quiet down there.

(ice crunches) As more researchers are finding out in the winter, there's actually a lot going on under the ice.

(drill whirring) All right, let's see what we got.

With time, the amount of ice that's on the Great Lakes and the length of time that that ice is out is changing.

When it's uncovered by ice and snow, you get a lot of sunlight that regulates where the phytoplankton are in the water column and that kind of structures this food web.

So what we're doing in this winter project is collecting samples from different depths in the water column that will be able to tell us where are those phytoplankton sitting and what types of zooplankton are there.

You got some copepods in there, some cladocerans.

Lots of interesting questions can be answered using these little creatures.

With time, the amount of ice that's on the Great Lakes and the length of time that that ice is out is changing.

So we're seeing extended ice-free seasons.

That could mean big changes in biogeochemical cycling.

When the ice is free, when the ice is off and that water is open.

How does that change the physics of the lakes?

How does that change mixing?

That affects all aspects of the lake functioning.

- So if you have an ice cover, there's usually some algae growth underneath the ice.

Some of those algae cells settle, allow enhanced productivity of invertebrates in the winter that are then available when those fish swim up to feed.

So losing ice is kind of a big deal.

- [Narrator] The loss of ice cover and warming of the lake have created additional challenges for those whose livelihoods depend on Superior's fisheries.

- Cold is beautiful.

Uniformly cold water out there, no trouble.

The top water gets warm, it'll get up to 60, 65 degrees, you know, and it's 39 degrees down in the bottom.

So you get some really weird currents.

And quite often we see it wind's one way and the currents another way.

So when the net comes up, it'll start spinning on you or the net will be way out there in front of the bow and the wind's pushing you back the other way.

And it's frightening sometimes.

On the end of each net, I carry large floats.

They're about this big.

It helps the trawlers see it, but also it holds that end up.

And when a current hits, you get out there and you realize they're underwater.

Say a little prayer, you stay there net, hold on, go back home.

And if it's been blowing northeast for, especially in July and August, when that top water's warm for a while, it's gonna be three or four days before you can get it up.

When the water's cold and uniformly cold, you don't get those problems.

You don't get the currents.

(light dramatic music) We've had warm water hold on longer in the fall.

That warm surface water pushes into October quite a bit.

It was 57 degrees surface water pushing November 1st.

That's really late.

Cold is beautiful.

- Lake Superior is unique among the Laurentian Great Lakes in that it's dominated by native species.

Most of the other lakes are dominated by invasive species.

Prey species like alewife, rainbow smell, huge populations of round goby.

And they go along with other invasives like zebra mussels and quagga mussels.

So those food webs are so altered by invasive species in the other lakes.

The conditions in Lake Superior sort of preserve it.

It's really cold and not a lot of those invasive species can deal with the cold.

So this cold water preserve that Lake Superior represents for native species seems to be changing.

Now, I don't think we've hit a threshold where they're gonna be able to become hyper abundant consistently, but if climate continues to change as it is, you're gonna see some of these invasive species that are on the edge of their range start to expand and increase, especially in areas like the St. Louis Estuary, which not only gets the most ship traffic in the Great Lakes, but we also have plenty of invasive species here in the estuary that potentially could spread to other river mounts and wetland areas as as you move up the shorelines.

And if warming continues, they'll spread naturally.

- [Narrator] As Lake Superior's waters have warmed, the impacts of climate change have become visible in the sky as well.

Increasing droughts and exceptionally hot summers have brought unprecedented forest fires.

The smoke-filled skies above Duluth inspired a new work by Jonathan Thunder.

- Uncle Harvey's Mausoleum is a relic of industry.

This story of a guy who wanted to outsmart the lake by putting a structure in the lake.

The lake made quick work, you know, the structure and this guy's business didn't really pan out after that.

Summer of 2021, seeing some pretty serious climate change week after week of record breaking heat waves, smoke coming from Canada, I just wanted to do a painting that talked about how we're sort of swan diving into this new era.

So the lake is melted ice cream in the painting, the lighthouse just seemed like a fun character to have playing that drum.

The crane in the painting represents my wife's clan.

Central figure in that piece is a bear.

And the identity of the bear in the Ojibwe clan system is that of a protector, someone who keeps the medicine for the people.

Climate change has been a discussion.

There have been scientists saying this will happen.

(waves sloshing) (gulls cawing) (light music) (light music continues) - All right, it's a great morning.

Look at how sunny!

- [Narrator] The wind died down in the early morning hours and the swimmers were able to continue through the night.

(horn blows) Wind, waves and cold water were the biggest challenges anticipated by the team.

The first two tested them, but water temperatures had remained in the sixties for the entire distance.

This fact underscored one of the primary goals of the swim; to raise awareness of Lake Superior's warming waters.

(people cheering) - We're in Duluth!

(bell dings) (boat horn blows) - [Spectator] Way to go.

(people cheering) - [Narrator] The story of the swimmer's accomplishment and the warming of Lake Superior was big news regionally and reached a nationwide public radio audience.

- We're excited to do it and complete the swim for ourselves.

But really the reason this is being organized is to draw some attention to the fact that the lake is warming at a really rapid rate.

And it's good for me, just in my own personal life, I guess to really think about these things.

(light dramatic music) (light music) - [Wayne] We have to share the earth, but we should share it in a reciprocal way where we respect one another and respect all of the gifts of God's creation.

(light music) - The estuary that we see now is a changed place.

During the colonization process, so the 1854 treaty was signed, the settlers really started to move into this region.

What they were originally interested in was minerals and timber.

First Superior became a city, and then Duluth as well really started to expand.

As they were developing, they really used the river as a way to flush out things we didn't want on the ground near our houses.

Things like wood waste, industrial effluence, PCBs or dioxins or furans.

- Late 1800s early 1900s, steel plant began working and they were dumping everything that come outta that steel plant right into the lake.

And that wasn't just the steel plant, United States Steel, that was many other corporations, manufacturers and so on that were extracting resources from the land and just dumping it into the river.

It's caused a big sore here.

- We probably lost over 60% of wetlands in the mouth of the St. Louis River.

The St. Louis River was dead.

It was effectively dead.

It didn't have oxygen.

Life requires oxygen.

That's a profound impact on a system.

There's a lot of diversity that was lost in that time.

The forests were dramatically changed.

Wetlands are very hard to restore.

It takes a lot of work and a lot of follow through that sometimes we don't have enough money for.

- Some of the things I've heard from people who were here when the estuary was at its worst, their parents said, don't go near the water.

It's not healthy.

The fish skin would slide off the fish when they touched it.

Their mom would make them throw their clothes into the washing machine because it stunk so bad.

People turned their backs on the river because it was so horrible.

(light music) - [Narrator] By the 1970s, stronger protections for the environment emerged as a national concern.

In 1987, the United States and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, which designated the St. Louis River Estuary as one of 43 areas of concern in the Great Lakes region, each of which had been significantly impaired by human activities.

With the help of many citizens, several local, state, federal, and tribal organizations began a huge restoration and remediation effort.

- The states and the federal government worked through the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement to list the most polluted, most degraded areas on the Great Lakes.

- We apply different sorts of remedies depending upon what the problem is.

So in the slips where we wanna maintain uses for shipping, we've kept the contaminants to a certain footprint and then applied caps to them.

That way the contaminants cannot move up through the food chain.

In some areas, we will take all the contaminated sediments out.

The third type of remedy that we apply is putting in pelletized activated carbon amendments, specifically targeting dioxin and furan contamination.

So we know it works for that contaminant.

- Around the turn of the century, we had very active sawmills here that left sawdust and slab wood in the river, completely choking out the habitats.

So we've had projects that actually address removing that milling waste and restoring the sheltered bays and the coastal wetlands that were there before.

We know anecdotally that the St. Louis River was once just filled with wild rice.

It was an ideal habitat.

Our goal is to work towards 275 acres for the area of concern.

But you know, we see wild rice restoration as an enduring effort in the St. Louis River - [Barbara] No matter where people live, whether they're inland or whether they live on the lake shore, their drainage is getting to the lakes.

- [Narrator] In urban areas, water from people's yards flows through the storm drain system and into the estuary and lake without being treated.

During the winter, reducing the amount of salt on sidewalks and driveways helps reduce runoff pollution.

In Duluth, Superior and North Shore communities, you can adopt your storm drain, pledging to keep it free of pollutants and debris.

- [Barbara] The more people can control things in their own yards and pick up litter, rake up their grass clippings, rake up their leaves, prevent any dog poop from getting into the storm sewers.

- We can make sure that we don't dispose of household hazardous chemicals improperly, but we don't want them going down our kitchen sink and we don't want them going down a local storm drain.

- We've worked really hard to make it cleaner and we need everybody to help keep it clean.

- Our future vision for the river is a river that people want to use and want to be near.

- As we've been making progress, people are returning to the river.

- [Interviewee] Birdwatching, paddling, boating, fishing, all these opportunities are going to just get a little better and a little better as this river heals.

- [Interviewee] It will remain changed in some ways, but it will also thrive in as a new place, as a place that is revised from what it was in the past through efforts to restore.

- I think it's also a a place that will bring all of those prophecies and considerations and conflicts to the forefront, and we have to resolve them.

That's the significance of this place.

(light music) (water trickling) - [Interviewee] When you look at who is gonna solve climate change and who is really gonna make the difference, it's the young people, the folks who have not ever experienced life without climate change.

They're the ones who are gonna be solving this.

(light music) - [Interviewee] I mean, it's really hard to live on our boat for weeks at a time and not be changed in some way.

- [Interviewee] We take on a crew of young adults, college aged kids, and we sail from port to port and we visit different schools.

- Who can tell me what invasive species is.

My name is Brandi Shapland and I'm 25.

I was interested in doing Sea Change because I love sailing and because I also am very passionate about the environment.

So this seemed like a really good opportunity to kind of tie those two things together.

- The crew, they're doing their presentations, they're helping with the cleaning and the cooking and all that kind of stuff, and sailing the boat.

(light dramatic music) Okay.

- [Brandi] I have a really deep connection with the lake just because I see it's such a powerful being.

It's alive.

Being able to see it every single day is powerful.

And watching it change and watching the weather roll in.

See how the waves can pick up so quickly just in an hour.

And we've had days where we've had six foot waves and you're crashing around and people are getting seasick.

- You start pulling, D. - [Brandi] It can be a very scary experience at first.

- I have no sailing experience.

(water splashing) (light dramatic music) - All right, Finlay, let's go ahead and go around to this side.

- [Brandi] To have your house moving all different directions and up and down and you're feeling nauseous and maybe cold and tired and scared and it can be a little overwhelming.

- Forward.

- Yep.

- [Brandi] But I think having a captain like Mark, who's always calm in those situations and really knows what he's doing.

- All right, hang on.

I'm gonna be back in a minute.

- [Brandi] Learning how to walk is a really big thing too.

And there's lines and wenches and kayaks, everything you can imagine on top of the boat.

And so when you're out there in high seas and being able to navigate the boat, and that is a really big skill.

- All right, we're sailing.

- Woo!

- Having that connection and that closeness, one with the crew, and then two with the students, was really powerful.

Thank y'all for listening.

We work mainly with fifth and sixth graders and do a lot of education on how climate change, plastic pollution, and aquatic invasive species are affecting Lake Superior.

And really try to focus on what the kids can do in their own lives to make a difference.

- [Interviewee] We show them a map of Lake Superior and we invite them to commit to some change they're gonna make.

And if they do, they get to sign the map.

- Avoid single use.

- [Brandi] Avoid single use plastic?

I love it.

- Plant more trees.

- Drive electric cars.

- Never use a single use water bottle again.

- No idling cars.

- Replant trees.

- Toss something in the trash.

You look at the number and it's like, can I recycle this?

- [Brandi] Try not to make it too scary because climate change can be a very scary subject for a lot of students, for a lot of young people.

- One way we help them to talk about it in a really fun way is to get them on the local radio stations.

Each group will either be working on plastics, invasives, or climate change.

And you write down who's gonna say what here.

And then when you're ready, we bring a recorder in and we record it.

And then we will send it to the radio station at the Two Harbors Community Radio and they play them just at odd moments during their day on the radio and they'd love doing this.

- Hello, our names are... - Lyla, - Dominic, - Daxton, - Laura, - And Gina.

- And today we're gonna talk about the climate change on Lake Superior.

- We record them doing little two minute snippets, - Fires, floods and drought, as well as invasive species and warmer temperatures are taking their toll on the forests and it shows.

- Wow.

- Do you think that's good?

- I think that was great.

We record those as podcasts and send them to the Two Harbors Community radio station where they play them throughout the summer.

(static rustling) - [Radio MC] Thanks for listening.

This is- - [Lyla] Lyla, - [Dominic] Dominic, - [Daxton] Daxton, - [Laura] Laura.

- [Gina] And Gina.

- [Dominic] From the North Shore Community School.

- [Students] Till next time!

(light music) - [Interviewee] I really hope that people can fall in love with Lake Superior and use it as a way to inspire them to do something about climate change.

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