The University of Michigan is helping them with a new $1.2 million research project. Dubbed the “Great Lakes Adaptation Assessment for Cities,” the project teams researchers with city decision makers in five Great Lakes cities. They’ll provide the climate change science specifically for those communities.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrE4gXGgJI0
Who’s eating whom in Lake Michigan?
The emergence of a few bad actors has made it difficult to answer that question.
That’s why University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researchers are studying the impact of aquatic invasive species — specifically round gobies — on Lake Michigan food webs.

Gobies are a ravenous and aggressive fish species that invaded Great Lakes in the early 1990s. They subsist on tiny bottom-dwelling organisms and feed on baby quagga mussels for a side dish, scientists say.
Food web research from Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana may determine whether Lake Michigan has reached …

Giant volcanoes formed the Great Lakes in prehistoric times.
Not quite, but that’s what seven percent of U.S. 12th-grade students guessed on geography tests last year.
More than half of students got it right: The Great Lakes formed when large volumes of freshwater melted from ice sheets and settled into depressed land.
A recent segment of Yahoo! Who Knew? highlights a low level of geography knowledge among American students — only 20 percent scored proficient or better on tests in 2010.
The U.S. team also lost to Russia, Canada and Taiwan at the World …

If it’s a beauty pageant, then Lake Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes is certainly the crowd favorite.
Good Morning America voters recently named it one of the most beautiful places in the country. And its 35 miles of sandy beaches and crystal waters earned it a top spot on a beach expert’s best Great Lakes beaches in July.
Host Josh Elliott visited Lake Michigan’s best-kept secret and called the dunes “stunning monuments to the passage of time.” They formed when ice sheets melted and formed glacial lakes, pushing rock debris to the shoreline.
Now …

The first European mariners to explore the upper Great Lakes set sail 332 years ago last Sunday.
Navigating the Niagara Falls proved too tricky for explorers before 1679, when Robert La Salle built a ship from scratch above the falls and cruised to Lake Michigan.
A super cool segment of Yahoo! Who Knew? explores the history of European adventures on the world’s largest freshwater bodies of water.
A sunken ship believed to be La Salle’s Le Griffon was found on the bottom of Lake Michigan in 2004; the French government claimed the “Holy …

myBeachCast app. Image: Limno Tech

A new smartphone app provides beach advisories and other environmental information in real time.
The myBeachCast app provides hourly updates from beach databases in Ohio, Michigan and Indiana, said Christine Manninen, communications and web programming director at the Great Lakes Commission, the Ann Arbor-based agency that developed the widget.
Illinois will join soon.
The other four Great Lakes states will be added before next May when the second version of the app will be launched, she said.
The app also provides weather conditions and a five-day forecast and wave height …

By Brian Bienkowski
Thousands of jobs, millions of dollars and a more stable climate are possible if Illinois aggressively pursues clean energy, according to a report released by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
The peer-reviewed report, dubbed “Bright Future for the Heartland,” predicts what would happen if Midwestern states reached two goals: produced 30 percent of its electricity supply from renewables by 2030; and reduced power consumption 2 percent every year starting in 2015. The goals came from policy recommendations that were …

Satellite images recently showed air pollution from Ontario fires in the Great Lakes region.
Nitrogen dioxide, which forms when nitrogen combines with oxygen during combustion, appears in NASA satellite images taken from July 15 to July 18.
The fires caused thousands of Canadian residents to evacuate.
The image was created with NASA’s Ozone Measuring Instrument. It measures the number of nitrogen dioxide molecules in a cubic centimeter.
The highest concentration was observed in the southern tip of Lake Michigan.
It prompted the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to issue an air pollution alert, reported the Duluth …