A new bill in the U.S. House of Representatives calls on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to create a high-resolution map of the bottom of all five Great Lakes by 2030.
Michigan Representative Debbie Dingell, a Democrat from Ann Arbor, said in a statement that the map will help protect the lakes, identify threats to aquatic species, and discover new economic opportunities.
John O’Shea is a professor at the University of Michigan who has spent time researching shipwrecks in Lake Huron.
He said the new map would expand our knowledge of previous measurements of lake beds.
“They tend to emphasize harbors and shore areas, and the farther away from the shore you get the less dense is the sampling,” he said. “With the new technology, it's possible to record depth in very fine-grain detail.”
O’Shea also said the map would benefit everyone who utilizes the lake.
“If you do anything on the water recreationally or involved in any kind of commercial activity, there's been discussions of putting wind farms in the Great Lakes, there's been discussions of putting pipelines into the Straits of Mackinac,” he said. “All of these things, you know, fundamentally the feasibility comes down to knowing the character of the lake bottom. ”
If the legislation is passed into law, the completed map will be made available to the public.
