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By Amir Daftari
News Reporter
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Jennifer Boehme spent her childhood combing Florida beaches for treasures, and now she leads a far more ambitious exploration, spearheading an effort to map the bottom of the Great Lakes.
As executive director of the Great Lakes Observing System, Boehme believes the project could assist ships in avoiding hazards, identify fisheries and help predict climate change impacts such as erosion, storm surges, and flooding.
"One of the things that keeps me going is the idea of the discovery aspect of it," Boehme said. "There's a lot we don't know about the lakes. We know more about the surface of the moon."
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Only a fraction of the Great Lakes' bottom has been mapped, and the available charts, completed decades ago, are low-resolution. The Great Lakes Observing System, which gathers and manages data from lake observers, has been pushing to create high-resolution maps of all five lakes since 2018.
The lakes span an area of 94,250 square miles, larger than the state of Kansas, with depths ranging from 210 feet in Lake Erie to over 1,300 feet in Lake Superior.
The campaign has gained traction as technology improves. Two Michigan congressional representatives, Republican Lisa McClain and Democrat Debbie Dingell, introduced a bill this year seeking $200 million to map the Great Lakes bottoms by 2030.
"I believe it's time to take exploration and discovery of the Great Lakes into our own hands," McClain said during a March House subcommittee hearing.
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The last attempt to map the lakes, in the 1970s, relied on single-beam sonar technology, similar to fish finders. These maps, which covered only about 15 percent of mostly coastal areas, were low-resolution and may have missed significant features like shipwrecks, sinkholes, canyons, and infrastructure, said Tim Kearns, a spokesperson for the Great Lakes Observing System.
Now, scientists have advanced tools like multibeam sonar, which sends multiple sound waves to create more detailed images, and laser imaging, which uses planes to generate 3D images of the lake bed.
A high-resolution map would provide a clearer picture of the lake bottoms, said Steven Murawski, a biological oceanographer at the University of South Florida. This data could improve shipping safety, predict storm surges and flooding, and provide crucial information for dredging and construction projects. Murawski has mapped pipelines in the Gulf of Mexico, noting that infrastructure is often "never where they're supposed to be."
While support for the mapping project is growing, Congress has not yet acted on the funding bill. Rep. Cliff Bentz of Oregon suggested during the hearing that supporters better explain the broader benefits of the map.
"I know ranking members suggested finding the Edmund Fitzgerald would be a valuable thing but there must be more to it than that," Bentz said.
The entire crew of 29 aboard freighter Edmund Fitzgerald died when the ship sank in Lake Superior in 1975.
Boehme remains committed to achieving the 2030 goal, despite uncertainty about the bill. "This research is for a public good," she said. "The key is persistence and going back again and again and making the case (to Congress) … We need to understand the system so we can conserve it."
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.
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