The Creationist Follies

[Odin]

(01-19-2017, 12:39 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote:

(01-19-2017, 01:41 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Back in September I went to Lake Superior (Pictured Rocks National Seashore -- spectacularly beautiful!) along Michigan State Highway 28... and I went to the beach. Perhaps because of global warming I was still able to walk into the water and feel the sand and still-tolerable warmth.

But one thing I noticed: there was a severe paucity of obvious life as one might expect at the same latitude in Maine.  Yes, Maine has a salt-water shoreline, but that is not the same story. Coastal Maine is enough like northern Michigan that one could easily confuse them... until one gets to the shoreline. Maine has rich sea life, including the famous and delectable lobsters. Michigan's 'northern Shore' is by comparison a biological desert. Climate? No. Salt water as opposed to sea water? Fresh-water lakes in southern Michigan teem with small fish and fresh-water crustaceans and mollusks.  Maine and southern Michigan were both glaciated, but water life found their ways back.  

Lake Superior does not have the sort of easy connection (first rapids, then the Soo Locks) to waters connecting to the Atlantic Ocean or the Mississippi basin. Life could easily return along the sea to Maine, too, once Maine was deglaciated. But water life has had little chance to get back into Lake Superior...let alone to evolve. Six thousand years versus one billion.

Unlike the ocean fresh water lakes have seasonal turn over. That is writ large with the Great Lakes, given the fact they ice up. Plankton don't do very well in this type of setting. The other factor is relatively speaking the Great Lakes don't get the input of nutrients the oceans do. And they have an outlet to exacerbate this. They are too pure.

It's crazy how pure and clear the water of Lake Superior can be at spots, you can see really deep when there is little wind and the water is calm. Weird to think that a person could stick a water bottle in there and just start drinking it.