Bayfield welcomes Viking Cruise ship
BAYFIELD, WI – Passengers traveling the Great Lakes aboard Viking Cruises’ Octantis explored Bayfield and the Apostle Islands on Tuesday.
The ship carrying 334 passengers and about 200 crew members parked just beyond the Bayfield Harbor breakwall. Tenders transported passengers to and from the 665-foot vessel to the Bayfield City Dock. The Red Cliff Drum and Dance Troupe welcomed visitors to shore at the Bayfield Lakeside Pavilion.
Bayfield city, county, and state tourism representatives explored the state-of-the-art cruise ship and presented the captain with gifts representing Bayfield. “We have been working to make this happen for about three years, so it’s great to see it come to fruition,” said Ted Dougherty, Chair of the Bayfield Harbor Commission.
Items presented to the captain included a framed print of “Voyage of the New World” by Rabbett Strickland, an artist and member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Dignitaries also gave the ship captain a copy of Jeff Rennicke’s book “Jewels of the Water: Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands.” Rennicke is a nationally renowned landscape photographer and writer.
Mary Motiff, Tourism Director for Bayfield County, gave the captain a print of the Octantis made by local photographer and graphic designer Jamey Penney-Ritter. She is also the owner of Bemused Gallery and Studio in Washburn.
Visitors from the cruise ship took advantage of a local excursion or opted to explore downtown Bayfield on their own.
“Many passengers are going back to the ship with bags from local shops and I’ve heard positive comments about the good food…Several people said they would love to come back. This is great exposure for Bayfield,” said Ruth Goetz, Dock Lead for the Great Lakes Excursion, Milwaukee Foods Group.
The Octantis will make five more stops in Bayfield this summer. The next stop is scheduled for Tuesday, July 26.
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Duluth Seaway Port Authority ranks favorably in Green Marine environmental rating
DULUTH, MN – The Duluth Seaway Port Authority and its terminal operations on Rice’s Point ranked among the nation’s top performers in the recently released Green Marine 2021 environmental performance report, posting a 3.8 score on Green Marine’s five-point scale. The overall average for port authority participants was 2.97.
The annual report rates port authority participants in seven categories: air emissions, community impacts, dry bulk handling and storage, environmental leadership, underwater noise, waste management, and a revised performance indicator for spill prevention and stormwater management. A record 50 North American port authorities participated in the 2021 evaluation process, with the Duluth Seaway Port Authority ranking No. 6 in the United States and No. 1 among U.S. Great Lakes ports.
“Green Marine provides a tangible annual scoreboard for environmental stewardship, with performance criteria that become increasingly robust each year,” said Jeff Stollenwerk, Duluth Seaway Port Authority director of government and environmental affairs. “The process raises awareness of our work to minimize environmental impacts and it inspires us to continually improve our environmental stewardship.”
The voluntary Green Marine certification program began in October 2007 and now includes more than 170 participating ship owners, port authorities, seaway corporations, terminal operators and shipyard managers. Program participants must adopt practices and technologies that continually reduce their environmental footprint on the land, air and sea. The Duluth Seaway Port Authority has participated since the program’s inception.
Duluth Seaway Port Authority
Great Lakes water levels could increase on average from 19 to 44 centimeters in the next few decades, study says
New research into Great Lakes water levels looks farther into the future to predict how much climate change will increase lake levels in four of the five Great Lakes.
The predictions for the levels between now and 2050 show average increases from 2010-2019 levels of Lake Superior rising 19 centimeters (7.5 inches), Lake Erie 28 centimeters (11 inches) and lakes Michigan and Huron by 44 centimeters (17.3 inches). Lake Ontario wasn’t included because the outflow from the lake is regulated and at the time, the model used did not incorporate the regulation plans of Lake Ontario.
These forecasts are a big departure from others, many of which only extend less than a year. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for example, puts out a six-month forecast bulletin every month based on current conditions and anticipated future weather. The reason these new projections can go out so far and so confidently is the advanced modeling used in the study, applied for the first time to the Great Lakes.
Presented at the Frontiers in Hydrology Meeting on Thursday and awaiting publication, the research – led by Michigan Technological University associate professor Pengfei Xue – used advanced climate modeling with a 3D hydrodynamic model to simulate the lakes more accurately. The modeling Xue used is more typically applied to oceans.
“We were able to develop a coupled modeling system that not only accounts for the interactions between the lakes, atmosphere and surrounding land, but also presented a more realistic and accurate representation of the Great Lakes hydrodynamic processes in climate modeling,” Xue said. “This is a necessary step to ultimately improve the long-term lake level projections.”
Read the full article at this link: https://www.greatlakesnow.org/2022/06/great-lakes-water-levels-increase-next-few-decades/
Great Lakes Now
