Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - The Great Lakes

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Alex Schmidt is joined by comedians/podcasters Rebecca Reeds ('The Villain Was Right' podcast) and Eli Yudin ('What A Time To Be Alive' podcast) for a look at why the North American Great Lakes are secretly incredibly fascinating. Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources, handy links, and this week's bonus episode.

The Great Lakes, known for being water, famous for being fire. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why the Great Lakes are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmitz, and I'm not alone. I'm joined by Rebecca Reeds and by Eli Uden. They're two wonderful comedians and podcasters. Rebecca Reeds is co-host of The Villain Was Right, which is a very funny pop culture podcast that pursues that premise. The Villain Was Right in the pop culture thing. That's a show on the From Superheroes network of podcasts.

Eli Uden is somebody I know from comedy and from collegehumor.com. We both work there and we're associated with it at various times. He's now one of the co-hosts of What a Time to Be Alive, which is a very funny podcast about news stories and recent things that make you say the title of that podcast. Also, I've gathered all of our postal codes and used internet resources like native-land.ca to acknowledge that me and Eli each recorded this on the traditional land of the Canarsie and Lenape peoples. I acknowledge Rebecca recorded this on the traditional land of the Haudenosaunee, Mississauga, and Wendat peoples, as well as many Anishinaabeg-speaking peoples, and acknowledge that in all of our locations, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and today's episode is about the Great Lakes.

This North American Great Lakes show is a patron pick. Thank you very much to patron Taylor for suggesting it, and thank you to everybody who voted for it in the polls. These lakes are absolutely the title of the podcast. I feel like we are going to get just one drop of water out of the vast amount of knowledge that you could have about these five humongous bodies of water and all the different interconnections and other things about them. One other thing to get into with that, and I want to signpost how important it is, so let's call it takeaway number zero. You know, zero because it comes before the rest of the show. Takeaway number zero, those Great Lakes are entirely the traditional land of native peoples,

including the Haudenosaunee, the Mississauga, the Wendat peoples. Also, I mentioned Anishinaabeg languages. land of native peoples, including the Haudenosaunee, the Mississauga, the Wendat peoples. Also, I mentioned Anishinaabeg languages. There were many, many peoples who spoke languages within that group. Some of them were on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, which is Rebecca's location. Others were on or near the entire rest of the Great Lakes. Then you got south of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. That was traditionally the land of the Haudenosaunee Confederation. Also, I did not know until researching, digging deeper, getting more into this. It turns out four of the Great Lakes have names that are either the names of native peoples or words from native languages. Lake Erie and Lake Huron are both named for peoples who lived there, the Erie people, the Huron people. And then Michigan and Ontario are both native words,

or at least anglicizations of native words. The name Ontario comes from the Haudenosaunee people, that means beautiful lake. The word Michigan comes from a French version of an Ojibwe Anishinaabe word. That word is Michigami, and that's a word that means large lake. And all four of these lakes had other names that other native peoples gave them as well. There's not just that means large lake. And all four of these lakes had other names that other native peoples gave them as well. There's not just one unitary one. And then when it comes to what's now called Lake Superior, that had many native names. One of them was the Ojibwa Anishinaabe name, Anishinaabewi Gichigami. That name means the Anishinaabe's sea. And Lake Superior, really sea-sized when you get down to it. But all five of these bodies of

water, they have an entire history. It's a lot of interconnected groups. It's a lot of them meaning many things to many different people. And the Great Lakes also still are that. There's a few examples. One of them I'm going to link is the website of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of the Odawa Indians. And that's one Anishinaabe language-speaking group. Traditionally, they lived on and near four of the Great Lakes, and they are still there. They're still here. Anyway, that's takeaway number zero for you. And it's one of many categories of knowledge and one of many lenses on these lakes. We're using them briefly to give you an overall picture of why the Great Lakes are the title of the podcast, and I'm so glad

you're here for it. So please sit back or gaze out across your own nearest body of water, right? It doesn't have to be a Great Lake to be the right lake for you. Either way, here's this episode of Secretly Incredibly Fascinating with Rebecca Reeds and Eli Yudin. I'll be back after we wrap up. Talk to you then. Rebecca, Eli, it is so good to have you both on. And I always start by asking guys their relationship to the topic or opinion of it. So either of you can start, but how do you feel about the Great Lakes? I don't, I realized after you asked me to do this, that I've never seen Lake Michigan. I was like, I thought I had all of them. I thought I had all the rings and apparently not. I'm going to have to go see it. Now it's on my list. Who has that on their list? That's insane. Going to see Lake Michiganigan i mean i've

i've seen all the other ones i gotta say superior my favorite i don't know if you guys have a favorite great matches up with the name well luckily i love a confident lake i love a lake that knows what it is 100 it's my favorite lake luckily this is some very serendipitous booking because I believe Michigan is the only one I have experience with. So we have all the homes, as the mnemonic goes. Okay. I went to college in Michigan, so I'm familiar with, I think I've driven over a bit of Lake Michigan into Canada, if that is a bridge that exists. So my experience, positive, looks cool from a bridge. I'll tell you that.

Not too much past it. My geography is god-awful, just in general. So I'm terrified of how many things I'm going to get wrong on this episode. Just my greatest fear is being asked, like if I had to do one of those quizzes you had to do in school where you fill in all the states and stuff it's that's my greatest fear i'd i'd retain none of it it is an amorphous mass in my brain um you know that's yeah i i think i mainly learned geography from it's funny we were just talking about shareware before we started.

I got a shareware game where it was basically the board game Risk, but with all the real countries in the world. Instead of Risk where it just makes everything blobs, I learned every individual country from a horrible war game. And so now I know where everything is. It's been great. I thought you were going to go with the classic Carmen Sandiego. That's what I feel taught a generation of children. some level of geography. I don't associate with criminals, so no. Only war criminals. That's right. Hague or nothing. That's me. But I, yeah. And with, with the Great Lakes experiences, Rebecca, I love that you've been to the four that are partly in Canada and then not Lake Michigan.

It's very exciting to me. And I grew up outside Chicago, so I basically grew up in Lake Michigan. It was great. It's right there all the time. How is it? Is it good as a lake? For real, I love it. And we also used to, like, our summer camp was on the western michigan side of

lake michigan where there are dunes and like i i have like so many formative lake michigan memories specifically and then have briefly been to some of the other ones and never to lake superior which i'm sure is great i'm sure it's really good yeah oh yeah they're all great you know by name i think i think i do really kind of like understand why they're called that because they do violate the thing in my head of that to me, because of my experience with lakes otherwise, like I should be able to see the other side of a lake. That's like part of the definition in my head. So it is kind of shocking to be, cause I mean, I, this is how my poor brain works, but it's like, if you're at the Great Lakes, your brain is sort of like, no, this is an ocean.

This is because you can't see. So it's an ocean. But yeah. I mean, it's almost a thing where I was thinking and I was like, are you even allowed to swim in them? I had so many dumb thoughts preparing for this. Just getting ready to embarrass myself on a recording. preparing for this just getting ready to embarrass myself on a recording i you know my my other great lake relationship is that every time i go into the ocean i'm surprised it's salty because i got used to the great lakes where it feels ocean-sized and is fresh water and then like somehow i'm still

shocked by the atlantic or pacific ocean i'm like oh what's in this god which is a thing i should move past this is spicy i'm the exact same i'm the exact same every time i go i'm like, oh, what's in this? God. Which is a thing I should move past. This is spicy. Oh, my God. I'm the exact same. Yeah? I'm the exact same. Every time I go, I'm like, this is so salty. And then I was talking to one of my friends, and I was like, oh, my God, I forgot how salty it is.

And they were like, yeah, it's the ocean. I was like, oh, no. Oh, I'm so dumb. So they were from California, clearly, based on that affectation. Yeah, you guys, it's very, very, you know, middle of the country. I'm the opposite, where I'd be like, you know, because I grew up on the East Coast and like DC, so right up, you know. I'll tell you, growing up near the Chesapeake Bay really has you know what the word brackish

means as a child. That's a good way to know what brackish is. Cause that's just constantly what they're telling you. It was horrifically polluted. So it was supposed to be a nice nature trip. And really it was kind of a warning to, it was kind of more of like a harbinger, like sort of thing like,

Oh, this is all the fish here is sick. And you know, poor little crabs, not a great Bay. I would not describe the Chesape is sick. And, you know, poor little crabs. Not a great bay. I would not describe the Chesapeake Bay as great. But, well, it's nice. You know, I don't want to get excommunicated from the Maryland area.

Right. A bunch of people wearing that crazy flag that Maryland has just keeping you out. Oh, man. Like, get out of here. This flag is 17 colors and you can't come back. A horrifically ugly flag. My apologies to Maryland, but it is. Just curious, Rebecca, you're in the Toronto area, I believe.

Is that where you're from originally? Yeah, pretty close. I was born an hour and a half outside of Toronto. Okay, so Lake Ontario area. Yeah, definitely. I have been fishing on Lake Ontario. Oh. like born in like an hour and a half outside of toronto okay so lake ontario area yeah definitely i have been fishing on lake ontario oh yeah you can just like rent a man and do that if you want to you just rent a man in a boat and he yells a lot and then apparently gets mad if you bring bananas on the boat it's like a whole thing why bananas what's this apparently an old sailor's tale it's

like it's like really bad luck apparently i have no idea and this man was like screaming at us about these bananas i thought he was joking i was like i'm not and then it was me and my whole family just slamming bananas into our faces and him just tossing the peels into Lake Ontario, which I'm sure is not allowed. And then he caught one of the banana peels later. It was insane. You know, literally hoisted on his own hook, sort of. Yeah. Just really. Well, there's actually,

there's going to be a lot of animal stuff in the show. And also with Luck on a Boat, the bonus show is all about shipwrecks. So we'll get all into that stuff later. But with the start of the topic on every episode, our first fascinating thing is a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. And this week, that's in a segment called What's New Number Stats? Whoa, whoa, whoa. And that name was submitted by Jared White. Thank thank you jared we have a new name for this

segment every week please make them as silly and wacky and bad as possible submit to sip on twitter or to sip out of gmail.com and uh the the first number here is easy it's five it's the number of great lakes we're talking about when we say the great lakes those are superior here on michigan erie and ontario And they get grouped partly because they have a water connection to each other. They're all connected. And also, I think they partly get grouped because they're the five biggest lakes in the US. Like, you know, part of the territory is Canadian in four of them, but that's part of the system there. There's also a small lake called Lake St. Clair between Lakes Huron and Erie. So there's sort of a mini lake in the Great Lakes too.

between Lakes Huron and Erie. So there's sort of a mini lake in the Great Lakes, too. Lake St. Clair feels very Canadian. It feels very quaint and delightful. It does. I live on St. Clair. Oh, really? There's so many St. Clairs. Oh, yeah.

I think I've seen it. It's next to Detroit and next to Windsor, Ontario, and I've been to those places. I've been to the Caesar's Palace in Windsor, Ontario, not to brag, but. Whoa. I drove by there after I had an Airbnb in Windsor and was like, I wish I had a stayed there. Oh my God. Don't get an Airbnb in Windsor. Lesson learned. But those sort of trips, it's funny to talk about, you know, casinos and stuff. When you go to college in, in Michigan, I went to the university of Michigan and Ann Arbor. It's a big thing to have trips into Canada because the drinking age is lower in Canada. And so that's like a big thing that

they'll do. Uh, I was in the snowboarding club. I'm not good at snowboarding, but I was on it mostly for the, you know, going to Canada and the partying. And let me tell you, if you go through customs or border the Canada border and you tell them that you are there on a snowboarding trip, they will search your car every single time. They will just assume that there is some sort of drug in your car. But it was it was it were nice trips. But it was, it was, it were nice trips. We went to basically the first city that you could stop at as soon as you cross the border, which was a tiny place called Sault Ste. Marie. And I've told that to some people who live in Canada and the response has usually been, why were you in Sault Ste. Marie? A very weird place for a, for a, you know, group of 70 to 80 college students to go and take over this this also reminds me that a lot of the first european people to like invade this region were french so there's a bunch of saint claire and saint marie and like uh catholic lady names for all these places but and uh yeah and these these five great lakes they're they're kind of the the famous ones at

least in north america when you say the Lakes. But there's other very large lakes in Canada, in particular, the Great Bear Lake. And then there could be a whole other episode about the Great Lakes of Africa. There's also Lake Baikal in Asia and the Caspian Sea, which is a salty giant lake in Asia. So a bunch of huge bodies of water all over the world. The Caspian Sea is a lake? Yeah, it's called a saline lake. And it's bigger than all these. That seems like a trick question. It does.

Rude. Well, and the next number here, this is just a huge number. It is 23 quadrillion liters. 23 quadrillion, that is a 23 followed by 15 zeros. That's how much water is in the five Great Lakes. I know it's not understandable. Oh, wow. I was going to guess Nestle.

That sounds like a Nestle number, doesn't it? That's how much they're holding back in their secret stores deep underground. Well, yeah now now we've entered two different things that i'm going to have trouble with we're talking about both geography and the metric system and now i'm reeling just trying to calculate this i think i as many uh public school educated americans the only way that i can imagine liters is a sequence of two liter soda bottles that's you might as well divide it in half. And it's really like, it's that many big Pepsis. And that's basically how

it makes you feel better. That's how I imagine it too. Okay. That does make me feel better. Yeah. It's surprising. That's the one, that's the one bottle that we've all accepted in America as, as like, you know, I'm surprised that they don't distribute it in like double gallons or something. But for that specific thing, we're cool with it. Yeah, if they ever tried to put American milk in like a liter bottle, every politician would go to war against those companies and get elected on it. Like, can you believe it? They destroyed the gallon. Yeah, a liter bag, right?

That would be the correct distribution method yeah in the metric system bagged milk that's that's one of my few things of knowledge about canada is the milk is bad it is bagged it's a point of people think it's weird and it is okay i was curious if it was a point of pride or if it was sort of a thing where can people were like, yeah, it's not our favorite. No, it's very weird. It's that and even the cartons sometimes freak people out, like a carton of milk. I used to date a French guy and he couldn't open the carton ever. He would carry it over to me like it was a jar too hard to open.

He's like, you got to do it. I can't. there's no way present it to you like a like a toddler with a capri sun yeah made me feel so powerful it was great oh yeah i like that not only is the different like metric versus imperial versus everything else it's tricky in general but especially with a number like 23 quadrillion liters like i didn't even look into the gallons like what even is that a way to think of it is that apparently if you took that amount of water in the great lakes the 23 quadrillion liters and you spread it across the land of the 48 u.s states that are contiguous if you spread all the Great Lakes water across the 48 states, it would cover them three meters deep in water.

Whoa. So about 10 feet of water over the whole middle part of the U.S. if you just put it there. That really sounds like a warning. That really sounds like a threat. That does sound like a threat. I'm like, oh, oh my god i'm underwater i'm not that tall you guys want to keep making fun of erosion here's what'll happen fill the whole grand canyon up was that part of it i'd like to know how how full the grand can't probably

all the way right i'm thinking the grand canyon is much smaller than the great lakes i told you my geography is very bad it It's very spurious. But it is like none of us really know how big these lakes are. It turns out another number is 20%. They contain about 20% of all the fresh liquid water in the world. It's just in these Great Lakes in North America, which you wouldn't realize. Like they're just sort of little blobs on the map. And then you go to them and it looks like a long lake,

but you don't really know how big. But they have that much of all the drinking water. Is there? That's very cool. I would like to see a movie that's like Mad Max style of Canada versus the U.S. for control. Oh my God, we'd lose so fast. I don't know.

We would lose so fast we would lose so fast oh yeah yeah y'all are operating on a different type of budget over there yeah and a different allocation of that budget to violence at the same time so just pure violence yeah yeah well and and next number here is more than a half more than a half is the amount of great lakes water that is just in lake superior it turns out lake superior has more water than the other four lakes all put together i had no idea that's why it's so cocky yeah earned arrogance just hard to deny because the the other four lakes their names come from native peoples but it was like french colonizers named it lake superior because they were like this is bigger than the other four and i'm amazed they were right those guys always get that stuff wrong and like it is actually bigger than the rest of them like that is true. Yeah. Yeah. You guys can keep these little runts.

We'll take the big one. Yeah. Take that over. Yeah, Lake Superior, the volume is, no one needs to understand these numbers, but the volume of Lake Superior is about 2,900 cubic miles, and the other four lakes are less than 2,600 cubic miles. And it also turns out Lake Erie is only a little over 100 cubic miles.

It's way shallower than the rest of the lakes. It's by far the least water. That's the baby, right? Erie is the little guy? Yeah, Erie has more surface than Lake Ontario, but it's way shallower and actually has very little water in it for being so big. It's way shallower and actually has very little water in it for being so big. Yeah.

Going way back in history, the next number is 3,000 years ago. It turns out 3,000 years ago is the approximate time when the Great Lakes formed into their present-day shape. So there have been people here for a long, long time before the Great Lakes, through glaciers and erosion and other movements, became like the approximate shape that we're used to. Yeah, that is way shorter than I would have expected. Yeah, like 1000 BC. Yeah. I'm like, should we be fearful of our future right now?

What do you mean it formed 3000 years? Are things just going to start popping up now? I don't know about this. I don't know if I wanted to know that, quite frankly. Those three meters of water are coming for us. Yeah. And this could kind of be a whole takeaway, but the Great Lakes were specifically formed by glaciers. And that's also how a bunch of lakes in North America formed. There was a massive ice

sheet of glaciers called the Laurentide Ice Sheet. It covered basically all of what's now Canada and a lot of the northern part of the 48 U.S. states. And that moved in about 100,000 years ago and then began melting and receding about 20,000 years ago. And as those glaciers moved, they pressed down land or gouged out land. And then those filled in and became lakes. So the five great lakes are all from just mind-bogglingly humongous glaciers digging that out of the earth. Well, then we don't have to worry. We're running out of those, aren't we? That's how that works, right?

We're almost out. It's good. We're melting them down to control them so they don't gouge out any new lakes. Enough lakes. It's true. Yeah. We're melting them down to control them so they don't gouge out any new lakes. Enough lakes. It's true. Yeah. Which means Minnesota must have gotten absolutely just wrecked by these glaciers. Just 10,000 gouging, just absolutely littered, just like mortar shells popping little lakes all over Minnesota. Yeah, that's exactly it. Like if folks don't know the saying about Minnesota as land of 10,000 lakes, it turns out there's actually more than 11,000 lakes, if you really count them. And they're basically all from glaciers. There's also big lakes in Manitoba from glaciers. There's the Finger Lakes in New York are from glaciers. This is all just glaciers rolling in, leaving. And then the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says that about 3,000 years ago, those initial Great Lakes they dug started to finally form and erode into

the shapes we've got. The whole northern part of the North American continent, like if you're at a lake, more often than not, it's something a glacier did, even the really little ones. This is all having kind of that pale blue dot effect on me where it's a very like existential moment in a weird way where you're just like oh my god this is we are just ants in a sandbox this is everything is oh god i'm so glad that's not just me man i've been sitting here like do do I exist? Do we exist? What's happening? Yeah, very much so. I kind of throw it home.

Yeah. And especially something just like glaciers or ice. And it's just like, oh, no, this is the scale of the earth is becoming quite apparent to me in a way that is existentially upsetting. Yeah, for sure. And then the scale of history, too, like these finally finished forming around 1000 BC, which is much more recent than stuff like the pyramids in Egypt. Like those were made, you know, like 1000 to 1500 years before that. So there were also native peoples here who had been here a long time, but also had like different lake situations than we are used to today if you go far enough back so this was happening they were just watching these things grow and then at one point they had they were just they had glaciers and then this is man yeah and in some cases shrink or you know because they're also either fed by rivers or dumping out into the

ocean because the the great lake system eventually reaches the Atlantic Ocean, too. And so, like we're saying, humongous thing that really gives you an overview effect where you're like, I am one person. Wow. Yeah. And where those rivers reach the ocean, you know what the water there is? Brackish. Again, my vocabulary vocabulary a mixture of salt and fresh water good crap good crabbing territory yeah yeah and also if people are curious like i'll have pictures linked of like where this ice sheet went some of it got as far south as modern day Missouri and Tennessee and in the United States. But out west and east, it was mostly a little bit past the current Canadian border.

So it's really like the upper Midwest where these Great Lakes are that it got really far south. And you can tell from all the humongous, like globally unique lakes that ended up happening. Yeah. And I mean, I don't know exactly but i mean the borders of u.s and canada are heavily influenced by the so that all just sort of had the ripple effect of almost laying out the future borders of the u.s and canada i would assume right yeah yeah you guys got the bad end of niagara falls no offense was the top better is that is that on the oh my god it's

so much better are you serious i mean they don't make us stand under it you could just look up it's better it's better on our side that's where you guys get that's where you're getting the barrels at the top and then across the border that like, I'm sure some people though, but like that's another geography thing I just finally understood by researching this is that Niagara Falls is part of the connection between Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Like that's also being generated by this whole system is, oh, it made one of the biggest waterfalls in the world. It's just all these lakes coming together. But you think just, oh, look at that falls. And you don't always like assemble it you know in your head and these lakes are so like humongous but also regional at the same time like i feel like people who grow up near them or on

them like oh you think about it a lot and then if you don't it's just a part of the world like okay sure it's out there yeah definitely wouldn't come. And debates on whether you want to swim in it or not. Should we swim in here? Is it fine? We're not sure. Yeah, are they clean? I guess. I mean, there's a few.

It's like every time I ask my dad, I'm like, do you think you want to eat fish out of here? And he's like, yeah, you could have one. Just one. Yeah, you probably, it's going to be fine. Yeah, man and boat, who you rent, it says. One a day, man and boat. Bananas, though, they will really throw off the whole thing. Yes.

They destroy the ecosystem. The pH of the lakes will be ruined well and that potassium or something that that segues pretty neatly into a lot of the rest of the show because the the last number here is a year it is 1969 and 1969 is the date when the cuyahoga river in cleveland ohio burst into. And also this got covered very widely and especially U.S. media. Certain from pollution, I would assume. Yeah, it was polluted enough, especially from oil that for about half an hour on June 22nd, 1969, an oil slick caught on fire and the Cuyahoga River was burning. You know, it's a body of water. It's full of water, but there's oil on it. And so it was on fire and it was covered nationally, especially by Time magazine.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Anytime water's on fire, I'm like, we're all dead, right? Like, we're all going to die. And they changed to absolutely nothing. They were just like, well, we're going to keep really focusing on oil, even though we're doing this. I mean, if a river caught on fire in, you know, older times before there was like as much of an understanding of science, that would have literally been like a religious moment that would have informed so many tales. That would have been like a story of the time that Odin

was infuriated. It would be like some crazy cool story about they were like, oh, someone stole Vulcan's wife, and then that was the day the river caught flame. Then we started throwing women into it, because why not? Right?

To try to appease him. and then it was just the normal however three hours that it lasted but to them they were like it's 36 women apparently that's how many we needed to appease him right they do that every time something happens it's 36 that's how we get the bad to stop my corn is smaller than usual gather Gather the 36 women. Great famine. Yeah, like, truly, this is, it's almost like in a scientific way, the whole US took it as an omen, like the world is displeased. And this is written up really well in Smithsonian Magazine. It's an article by Lorraine Beausenois. She talks about how within a couple years, the U.S. did a bunch of new laws to try to clean up water, mainly because they saw this fire on the Cuyahoga River. That was 1969.

And then the U.S. held its first Earth Day holiday in 1970. 1972, Congress passed the Clean Water Acts, and then also the U.S. and Canada signed the Great Lakes Water Quality Act. Immediately, the U.S. was like, just whatever laws fix the river fire, let's go, let's do it. Oh, so they actually did react. I'm almost surprised, which is not good, but it really ushered in a lot of uh changes i guess that is it is as

shocking as it sounds yeah yeah there were like there were other trends especially a big oil spill in santa barbara california like this was when a lot of the environmental movement was getting going but but this river fire ends and this river goes into lake erie. It was famous enough that Dr. Seuss made fun of it. He wrote The Lorax in 1971. And there's one part of The Lorax that describes fish in that book needing to walk on their fins to find better water. And then the next rhyming line name checks Lake Erie. It's going on there, too. It is in a Dr. Seuss book from this time.

Oh, wow. Oh, my God. I had no idea idea i do feel like i remember that a delightful illustration of little oil-covered fish maybe not delightful that's it well they're smiling they're just flicking it off like hey well we probably have what two or three years before some similar fracking-related thing occurs. I don't know. Collapsing a large part of the United States or something. Opening up an ancient cavern system. Right.

That's when we get the really big waterfall, right? Like, that's it. Oh, yeah. Oh, and then we regret. Yeah. Then the three meters comes rushing in and forms just a true pit sinkhole. I'm realizing I really like that number because it helps me understand how much water is in the Great Lakes, but it is also the apocalypse. Like, I think I delivered it pretty upbeat before but it would be everyone dying so that's not great uh somehow it makes me like understand more and less at the same time

does that make any sense i'm like i get it and i don't at all like i can't my brain cannot fathom this it's like it's like trying to imagine what a trillion dollars looks like it's just like i don't understand it you know um i bet it would all fit in a suitcase though you know what i mean like you i bet you'd just be so surprised like oh that's actually not a lot at all was it that's that was one of the uh one of the great like sight gags of um i think it was in dodgeball um of all movies where he's like he has a suitcase filled with like a hundred thousand dollars and he opens a suitcase and it's basically like one stack of bills it's really not that much uh yeah very good but yeah three i mean

yeah that's just that is the apocalypse. Yeah, it's not great. Terrifying. All right, off of that, we're going to a short break, followed by the big takeaways. See you in a sec. I'm Jesse Thorne. I just don't want to leave a mess. This week on Bullseye, Dan Aykroyd talks to me about the Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, and his very detailed plans about how he'll spend his afterlife. I think I'm going to roam in a few places, yes. I'm going to manifest and roam.

All that and more on the next Bullseye from MaximumFun.org and NPR. Hello, teachers and faculty. This is Janet Varney. I'm here to remind you that listening to my podcast, The JV Club with Janet Varney, is part of the curriculum for the school year. Learning about the teenage years of such guests as Alison Brie, Vicki Peterson, John Hodgman, and so many more is a valuable and enriching experience, one you have no choice but to embrace because, yes, listening is mandatory. The JV Club with Janet Varney is available every Thursday on Maximum Fun or wherever you get your podcasts.

Thank you. And remember, no running in the halls. And also the the other other thing with this Cuyahoga River fire is like there's a little bit of a myth about it because i i actually i there's like this weird midwest thing where when you live in one of the states you make fun of all the other states and so i knew people in illinois who'd like make fun of cleveland for like ah the river caught on fire one time and it turns out the real story is that the river caught on fire like many times this was a very frequent phenomenon in the history of cleveland specifically um smithsonian says they had used the river as sewage disposal for decades and they also

just like let a lot of oil and other wastes like that go into it and so there were more than a dozen documented fires on that river within the previous hundred years of this 1969 river. It happened kind of all the time. Yeah. I feel like Cleveland is a punching bag in general. Yeah. You know, it kind of gets, it's got the rock and roll hall of fame, but that's mainly it. I mean, going, especially going to Michigan, living in Michigan, Ohio is a big, there's definitely a huge thing with that, with Michigan versus Ohio.

And then more specifically, obviously, like Michigan versus Ohio State. But yeah, I mean, if your river's catching on fire that much, it is a little bit your fault. You should probably, it keeps happening. Dozens? Like a dozen times? You got to ask yourself a question. If a river catches on fire a dozen times, is it legally a river? Can you legally even call that a river i don't think so i don't think that's real right right eventually it's one of those like long fuses on a stick of dynamite or something like it's just not a stretch of water anymore yeah maybe that was their

solution they're just like we'll keep burning off the top layer we'll light it on fire every couple weeks and just kind of clean it off get all that stuff off the top um it's it's honestly shocking i don't i don't it may still be incredibly polluted it probably is it's shocking to me that that it's not still i mean from that many fires that it's that river isn't just gray still from like soot and stuff like that yeah yeah because the other other thing is like when time magazine reported this in 1969 they accidentally used a picture from a previous fire because it had happened so often so they printed a picture from a 1952 river fire

because also stuff probably looked kind of the same like i think i think the many burnings did not change the content of it that much like it did not do that thing you would think where eventually it just like i guess ends up in the air or whatever it's still not great but you know how do you even tell this is like yeah do they have to post a correction like excuse us this is from the previous fire excuse me yeah people are like there you can see a blockbuster in this one this is from a couple years ago this isn't it it's not there anymore now what's the last has this happened recently or we did fix it in some way has there been a recent river fire? I know you probably don't have this information in front of you, so I apologize.

Maybe it's for me to research. No, that's kind of a perfect question because the next takeaway here is about where pollution is at now with the Great Lakes. Takeaway number one for the main show. The Great Lakes are much less polluted and much more polluted than people think it turns out we've moved into a situation where like we're doing a much better job with that kind of pollution that's like loose oil and trash and sewage but there's like a different issue mainly with invasive species and also algae. That's sort of a new issue.

But the end result is like in some places, the water is much bluer now in the lakes and like it looks prettier even in some spots. But there's kind of a just different challenge going on. Yeah. Like those like those bugs were all supposed to be killing right now. The lantern flies. Not to time this episode, not to make it less evergreen but i'm disappointed i haven't seen one yet i haven't had a chance to help my city or country oh yeah we have like fish wanted posters all around like it's just like have you seen this fish if you see this fish kill this fish yeah put this fish back in they

look and say there's always like just these little like wanted posters all over the place of these like certain types of carp or whatever that's one of the species yeah this is like a broad good news bad news thing with pollution because the good news is cities are like much more thoughtful about what they're dumping in rivers and into the lakes than they used to be. Like Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, they're generally doing a better job. The biggest change is that U.S. cities began doing what's called sewage treatment in the 1920s. And Canadian cities do too. But that's where you take contaminants out of wastewater before you release it safely or reuse it safely.

And when they scaled that up, that made a huge difference for the lakes. It just less goes in. I feel like if you keep introducing unrelated fun facts, but I was watching, watching something because New York city has one of the craziest waste sewage treatment systems in the country because of the volume and all that. And they were talking to somebody about it.

And what they said was they were like, yeah, it was, you know, it's this incredible system. But at the same time, even though it is such an impressive system, it just isn't working anymore because it's just it helps a little bit. But there's just such I mean, with the development of New York city and the population at this point, I don't know. I mean, maybe all the empty $4 million apartments are helping the population, but, uh, it's, they basically just kind of throw up their hands and they're like, yeah, it's, you know, they say at this point, it's like the flotation device under your seat and the airplane where they're like, yeah, we can't treat all this water.

So, well, and yeah, and like you say, Eli, there are other cities on the Great Lakes too, where the system can't keep up. Apparently one incident was in Toronto in the summer of 2017, the city experienced massive rainfall to the point where they couldn't contain the sewage and just like the water coming into the city sewers. And so they had to release some partly treated sewage into lake ontario because the alternative was like toronto would flood so they just handled it that way and that happens from time to time in these great lake cities too

yeah it does also feel like an unfortunate sort of give and take between the u.s and canada on the bordering cities because you're only controlling some of what's going into the lake either way yeah if Toronto is releasing a bunch of sewage into the lake and we're just like well that's in there I mean what can we do about it I mean I'm sure we're doing much worse but yeah it's like when one of your roommates isn't great and you're like well if you're not taking out the garbage I'm not taking it out either. So deal with that. Yeah. They wake up and Lake Ontario is filled with Canada's dishes.

I'm like, come on, man. You got to clear this out. You got no space. Prime Minister is like, they're soaking. Or just some excuse. They're soaking. Yeah. I'll get them. I'll get them.

Don't worry. It's for the morning. Need that cast iron to really rust up before I get it out of there. Got a nice bit of oxidation going on. Well, and like, as far as a gross roommate to the world, probably the grossest system is in the Great Lakes city of Chicago. Hey, shout out where I'm from. Well, you guys keep dumping green dye into it.

That can't be helpful, right? Hey, a few of us are Irish, maybe. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, but they with with their main waste, like Chicago has a small river called the Chicago River and the city used to just dump all of its waste down that river into Lake Michigan. And I think the concept was that Lake Michigan is so big, it can just take it like it's not a problem. But they found out that's not true. Yeah. And then so what Chicago did is partially like modern stuff like wastewater treatment and environmental laws.

But the main thing they did was reverse the flow of the Chicago River. So what they did is they set up a bunch of like locks and engineering where instead of flowing into Lake Michigan, it flows completely the other direction into the Illinois River, which goes into the Mississippi River, which goes down into the Gulf of Mexico. And so Chicago has just shot most of its waste down toward the entire rest of the world instead of Lake Michigan. That's their approach. The fact that you can change the flow of a river is, again, I'm having trouble. It just feels like spitting in the face of God. I don't know.

It just feels like spitting in the face of God. I don't know. I would think that if you did that, that's when everything would flood. You would have broken something. Is it still reversed now? Or this was temporary? It's reversed, and I'll link about it. They also undid it and redid it one time.

And I don't really understand the engineering. I just know it's a thing they did. And it's been an overall part of like Chicago's waste management system is to just fully turn this river into kind of a machine that is not a river anymore. Wow. You would assume that would like fundamentally disrupt some. You know what I mean? Like releasing wolves into a park. You know, like it's just gonna it's gonna change some stuff yeah it seems like change the moon's road the path of the moon you

know like it's gonna send something out of orbit it's just i mean that to me is on the level of like a weather machine like that it seems like a mad scientist plan to me. I'm going to reverse the Chicago River and flood, you know, like it's crazy. And get the death ray out. Yeah, it's like literal Batman plot stuff. Flooding Madison Square Garden with the reversed river. Reverse the Hudson River and flood the Chelsea Piers. I don't know, flood that mini golf course. Yeah, it actually did flood parts of the Mississippi River and people sued and there was a drawn out legal battle over it.

And apparently a lot of the pollution effects are felt in like Louisiana is the result of Chicago deciding let's protect the Great Lakes and shoot it the other way. Shoot it the other way shoot it the other way incredible but yeah and so like for good reasons and bad the great lakes have a lot less of that human feces and oil and that stuff in them the main new pollution problem is invasive species and rebecca that's amazing you've seen like posters about carp one of the new ones is they're called asian carp but it's four different species of like fish that do not live there normally and would like eat everything if they were allowed to live there. I mean, it's how do they know what how they got. I'm trying to think of saying this in a way that doesn't make me sound like a child, but I don't.

I mean, I understand some things about like invasive, like when somebody brings them. Yeah. Yeah, this one, it's kind of two reasons that they all come down to like shipping, like cargo ships and moving things by water. There's always been like a natural connection from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean,

but especially in the 1900s, people expanded it. If people have heard of the st lawrence seaway that's like an expansion of the st lawrence river and other waterways they also built a canal called the welland canal and so all that means that there's like a strong water connection now between the great lakes and the oceans and the the worst species to come out of it is probably the lamprey which is a just kind of a nightmare animal to look at in my opinion but awful awful thing they have like i don't even know what it looks like it's basically like a massive leech with teeth it's oh yeah okay

yeah i don't like that either it's like a a Magic the Gathering card. It's awful. It's very scary. Yeah, they're one of those animals that latch on to things, just generally a bad genre, I think. I am sad I Googled some of this, because then there's pictures of a guy holding up a fish with a lamprey just on it to say, like, the lampreys are back they're growing again and it's it's like horror movie stuff um yeah but they they got brought in through just like international water connection and then

apparently they thrived and by the 1950s they were killing over 100 million pounds of great lakes fish per year and since then humans have just actively poisoned them or hunted them in every way they can to keep the population down. But it's something that basically Europeans just introduced into the Great Lakes, and they're never probably going to leave. Yeah, and really a terrible thing to introduce. This doesn't even look nice. This is bad on every

every single level of this thing no i made the mistake of googling it i'm looking at one terrifying like sci-fi terrifying like yeah very very dune sandwormy if i remember correctly or like it should be on an alien ship or something like yeah yeah definitely face hugger vibes they definitely not yeah i mean when it's when you'd prefer a leech that's not a good sign for an animal if only you were a leech instead yeah and and this is there's a whole bunch of less gross species, too. Popular science says humans have introduced approximately 180 species to the Great Lakes since the 1800s. And it's usually through water connections. And then maybe the most dangerous one is a very low-key one. It's two different species of mussels. different species of mussels the the zebra mussel and the quagga mussel or what they call they're just little mollusks but they think they were attached to cargo ships and you know like fell off reproduced thrived and they're a danger to basically all life in the great lakes because they're over consuming the algae and nutrients that are naturally there and that's that's very

foundational to the food system and then you know it's it could be a matter of time before everything else goes they'll also cut the hell out of your feet yeah if you step on one it is a nightmare oh no this has happened this comes from personal when you dove off the fishing oh. Oh, absolutely it has, yes. Wow, okay. Yeah, definitely. Just ripped, sliced my foot right open. Yeah, that makes sense. I guess it's, I mean, this is, you know, because it all seems like that, you know, you always get the examples when they're teaching you about stuff like this where, you know, it's that classic butterfly effect of, oh, you know, this one thing changes in the ecosystem and then the wolves leave. And because the wolves leave, there's too many deer and like that. changes in the ecosystem and then the wolves leave and because the wolves leave there's too many deer like that and it seems like we are playing incredibly fast and loose with that that it's just all in flux at all times yeah and it's it's a surprising one too because like

i'll link a chicago tribune article from a few years ago where they say that parts of lake michigan in particular are a lot bluer now than they used to be. Like the water is the color that we think is super clean, but it's because mussels have eaten all the green and brown positive stuff that was there before. That was like toilet water. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a swimming pool more. It's just like stuff's gone.

Yeah. Wow. But the, you know, the good news is hopefully either mussels can be cleared out or we can introduce other nutrients by, again, keeping pollution out and stuff like that. The other thing people are watching is a different toxic kind of algae that can bloom in the lakes, especially Lake Erie. and I'll link to a Vox article that has like satellite photos of big green stretches of Lake Erie in the summer because that algae is thriving in the absence of the good algae. And also because runoff from farm fertilizer is nutrients for that. It's like, oh, great. I grow from that.

Yeah. I mean, as far as like my experience with lakes, very small ones that I would swim in, used to get one up in New Hampshirepshire and like with my parents and and what i'm sure is very healthy for the lake if you go more than about two feet out the you step into what feels like just the worst like you know just kind of it's gooey yeah like yeah very like elder god sort of being swallowed up uh thing but again i'm sure you know the same as anything trying to clean what we perceive as gross is probably the healthiest possible iteration of something yeah uh it's almost brackish is the right word like any anything marshy feeling a bunch of stuff can eat that and live in that and they love it you So you don't want the lakes actually to be too blue and pristine.

That's not great. I feel like I'm going to be whispering that word to myself when I'm doing the dishes later or something. It's a great word. That's, I think, why it's stuck with me for so long. It's like a word a day word. You know what I mean? You see that on a calendar somewhere for sure. And depending on what you were cooking, the water in your sink might be quite brackish.

If it was very salty, you're doing a very salty dish. Well, there's one other takeaway for the rest of the main episode here. It's pretty quick. But takeaway number two. Thousands of years ago, there was a massive sixth Great lake there used to be a whole nother one and it was basically where manitoba is now was all a giant great lake uh but many thousands of years ago and it drained into the others or so it's another glacier thing and the key sources here are north dakota geologic Survey and the CBC.

Because we're talking about the glaciers before that formed these Great Lakes. It took a lot of time for the glaciers to recede. And there was a situation where at one point they were in between a lot of what's now Manitoba, North Dakota, and Hudson Bay. Manitoba, North Dakota, and Hudson Bay. And so instead of rivers being able to just empty into Hudson Bay by going northward, they would just like get stopped by the glaciers and pool and form like a super lake, a lake that's bigger than the other five Great Lakes put together. And so for about 2000 years, that was what Manitoba, North Dakota, a lot of that area was, was just a huge lake. Did they have a name

for it? Yeah, and it is like before there was really written human history there, because this was about 10,000 years ago. But in modern times, we've named it Lake Agassiz, which is named after a scientist

named Louis Agassiz, who lived in the 1800s. But we don't know what the name was back in the day. Yeah. The name for Andre Agassiz has been alive for millennia. There's also, I'm fighting with so many of these, you know, kind of like stupid. And there's a thing in my head, there's like a little voice in the back of my head that I understand that this is a belief that borders on flat earth, like levels of stuff. But I'm curious if either of you, somebody out there who's listening to this,

or maybe I'm extremely dumb, which is very possible, but like a little bit in your head, doesn't all the water flow down? Because you're thinking of a globe and I'm like, you can't stop the body. It's like a little bit in my head is like it all goes down and i'm just like completely ignoring elevation and all that because of my vision of the earth as a globe it's like well it goes down

and then i think you should just hold on to that I think that's a very whimsical thought that I would like you to keep in your head, quite frankly. I think that's a lot more fun than flat Earth. You're like, you're like pyramid Earth. Everything drains down. There's a great waterfall at the base of the Earth. There's a great waterfall. Pouring out.

Instead of you can dig a hole to China, it's if you get in a river long enough you'll just pour off the bottom of the planet it's like it's like the earth is like a classic platformer like you can only go one way you can't go backwards forget it like you have to yeah the yeah it's exactly it's like a sonic level it's exactly, it's like a sonic level. The University of Michigan is going to contact you and be like, bleep out where he went to college. This is not a good look for us. We don't want to be associated with this thought process. Or at least clarify that he went to art school here.

Or they're like, because of our rivalry edit it and so that it's you being like i went to ohio state buckeyes while i was at ohio state university i thought the wall the water to be clear this is not a genuine belief i have i have to redeem myself at least that much it's just a sort of it's a thought that's immediately dismissed and then i'm mad i'm upset that it happened but i was like yeah no of course not of course not it also involves some rivers i don't think about much but like today there are rivers like the saskatchewan River and the Red River that flow north into Hudson Bay. But when they were blocked by glaciers and when the precipitation that forms

them was blocked, it created Lake Agassiz, which had a surface area of about 170,000 square miles. And all you need to know is that's almost double the surface area of the five Great Lakes we have now. So there was just this huge, like blob shaped giant lake in the middle of surface area of the five great lakes we have now so there was just this huge like blob shaped giant lake uh in the middle of a lot of the you know canadian prairie there today which does just feel like at that point it is there would have to be a new word for that that was just freshwater ocean basically yeah more or less like that's beyond anything i could ever yeah because it would be rivaling i mean it'd be insane or just be like that's one of the

freshwater oceans that we have um and it also like part of how we know it was there is that it had beaches and so apparently in the 1800s people started discovering that it used to be there because they would find like a long sandy stretch of land in the middle of manitoba and they'd be like why is there a beach here no manitoba known for their beaches sunny manitoba sunny sunny manitoba where everybody likes each other for sure i uh i for a second was afraid that you were gonna say there were beaches because in the 1800s people would go there and I was going to lose my mind. And I was like, when was this?

No. You've already destroyed my thought, my pictures of, you know, my understanding of the earth. Yeah. Yeah. These are called paleo shorelines because they're what used to be like a sandy shoreline of a lake that's not there uh but also like if people want to go to where it used to be you should go to lake winnipeg which is like a sizable lake that's still there in manitoba today but that that's kind of where the center of it was and that and a few other lakes and and especially manitoba are

a former super great sixth lake oh the remnants yeah i would also follow that up with nobody should ever go to winnipeg you have much more canada knowledge than i i've been pretending i know where manitoba is for about 20 minutes um yeah you don't want to you just skip right over. Sit at the next spot. Is this your equivalent of the Michigan-Ohio rivalry? The Manitoba? Oh, I don't know. Every time I go to Winnipeg, I'm like, why is everyone so mad?

I think it's the weather. I'm not sure. But everybody seems really upset. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I did. I heard a story where, I guess, in the 90s, specifically in Winnipeg, they put on Hamlet

as just a play and Keanu Reeves was in it. He's just in the cast. And a patron of the show saw it. They said it was very fun and that he was a fun Hamlet in Winnipeg. Oh, I believe that. He was Hamlet? That's probably the best. That's the funnest fact you could find about winnipeg i think

that's the greatest thing that ever happened they still speak of that to this day they have a statue of him on top of some stairs they put it up before the play not as piano as fictional as hamlet folks that is the main episode for this week my thanks to rebecca reeds and to eli euden for rolling with that part where i did a biblical flood in my mind to the entire 48 u.s states if any of you had an arc ready to go when I did that, you were very prepared. Anyway, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. E if you support this show on Patreon.com, patrons get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is the strange history of Great Lakes shipwrecks.

Visit SIFpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than nine dozen other bonus shows, and to back this entire podcast operation. And thank you for exploring the Great Lakes with us. Here's one more run through the big takeaways. Takeaway number zero, the Great Lakes are really comprehensively traditional native land. Takeaway number one, the Great Lakes are much less polluted and much more polluted than people think. And takeaway number two, thousands of years ago, there was a massive sixth Great Lake. Because, hey, there's a bunch of numbers and stats on the show about the size, scale, and glacier history of these lakes. Those are the takeaways. Also, please follow my guests. They're great.

Eli Uden is one of the hosts of What a Time to Be Alive, along with Kath Barbadoro and Patrick Monaghan. I'm linking that show, also linking their bonus shows. And then Eli is on Twitter at Eli Uden. His last name is Y-U-D-I-N. Rebecca Reeds, also on Twitter, at Rebecca Reeds. Her last name is R-E-E-D-S. And Rebecca is one of the hosts of The Villain Was Right, along with Craig Fay. And that is on the From Superheroes Network. Fantastic pop culture stuff, mostly from Canadian folks, too. And it's just a great show. Many research sources this week. Here are some key ones. And I leaned on lots of data and materials from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. Also a big source for

the whole show, especially the invasive species, is a book called The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. And that book's written by Dan Egan, who is a journalist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper. He's also a senior water policy fellow for the University of Wisconsin system. Beyond that, used lots of reporting from the Chicago Tribune, the CBC, National Geographic. Find those and many more sources in this episode's links at sifpod.fun. And beyond all that, our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by The Budos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra, extra special thanks go to our patrons.

I hope you love this week's bonus show. And thank you to all our listeners. I'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then.