Climate change could alter the chemistry of deepwater lakes and harm ecosystems

Desdemona Despair

By Alexander L. Forrest
13 June 2016

(The Conversation) – In an age of rapid global population growth, demand for safe, clean water is constantly increasing. In 2010 the United States alone used 355 billion gallons of water per day. Most of the available fresh water on Earth’s surface is found in lakes, streams and reservoirs, so these water bodies are critical resources.

As a limnologist, I study lakes and other inland waters. This work is challenging and interesting because every lake is an ecosystem that is biologically, chemically and physically unique. They also are extremely sensitive to changes in regional and global weather and long-term climate patterns.

For these reasons, lakes are often called “sentinels of change.” Like the figurative canary in the coal mine, lakes may experience change to their ecosystem dynamics before we start to see shifts in the greater watersheds around them.

In a study I recently co-authored with Goloka Behari Sahoo, S. Geoffrey Schladow, John Reuter, Robert Coats and Michael Dettinger, we projected that future climate change scenarios will significantly alter natural mixing processes in Lake Tahoe in the Sierra Nevada range that are critical to the health of the lake’s ecosystem. This could potentially create a condition that we termed “climatic eutrophication.”

While many groups have studied the long-term impact of climate change on lakes, this process can now be added to the growing list of drivers of eutrophication. This is a potentially damaging phenomenon that could affect a number of vital deep-water lakes around the world, degrading water quality and harming fish populations.

Eutrophication is a condition that occurs when lakes and reservoirs become overfertilized. Cultural eutrophication is a well-understood process in which lake and reservoir ecosystems become overloaded with chemical nutrients, mainly nitrogen and phosphorus. These nutrients come from human activities, including fertilizer runoff from farms and releases from sewage systems and water treatment plants. Natural weathering processes, atmospheric deposition of air pollutants, and erosion also transport nutrients that are already present in the watershed into the water supply. [more]

Climate change could alter the chemistry of deepwater lakes and harm ecosystems

ABSTRACT: Using water column temperature records collected since 1968, we analyzed the impacts of climate change on thermal properties, stability intensity, length of stratification, and deep mixing dynamics of Lake Tahoe using a modified stability index (SI). This new SI is easier to produce and is a more informative measure of deep lake stability than commonly used stability indices. The annual average SI increased at 16.62 kg/m²/decade although the summer (May–October) average SI increased at a higher rate (25.42 kg/m²/decade) during the period 1968–2014. This resulted in the lengthening of the stratification season by approximately 24 d. We simulated the lake thermal structure over a future 100 yr period using a lake hydrodynamic model driven by statistically downscaled outputs of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory Model (GFDL) for two different green house gas emission scenarios (the A2 in which greenhouse-gas emissions increase rapidly throughout the 21^st Century, and the B1 in which emissions slow and then level off by the late 21^st Century). The results suggest a continuation and intensification of the already observed trends. The length of stratification duration and the annual average lake stability are projected to increase by 38 d and 12 d and 30.25 kg/m²/decade and 8.66 kg/m²/decade, respectively for GFDLA2 and GFDLB1, respectively during 2014–2098. The consequences of this change bear the hallmarks of climate change induced lake warming and possible exacerbation of existing water quality, quantity and ecosystem changes. The developed methodology could be extended and applied to other lakes as a tool to predict changes in stratification and mixing dynamics.

Climate change impacts on lake thermal dynamics and ecosystem vulnerabilities