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Thursday, August 5, 2010

Last day of camp, Last GIAC cruise

Today was the last day of the water wizards summer camp with youths from Dryden/Freeville and Newfield, and it was also our last program with the GIAC pre-teen green program. This Sunday, some of the youths from the GIAC program will join us for our eco-cruise, along with artist Louisa Sandvik.

Today we tried to look at a little mystery in the lake: the thermocline (division between warm and cold water), seems to have disappeared. We borrowed a Hydrolab from the City of Ithaca to do some more high-tech monitoring of the lake, and found a steady decrease in temperature down to about 30 meters, and then temperature holding fairly steady down to the bottom of the lake. Usually we see a period of rapid temperature change around 15-20 meters, so we're not really sure what's going on with the lake today.

We also found continuing small-scale blooms of Microcystis, a potentially toxic blue-green algae. The lake seems to be doing many different and interesting things this week, so we'll make sure to keep an eye on them.

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