With a surface area of 7,340 square miles Lake Ontario is the smallest of the Great Lakes, but it's waters run deep; with a maximum depth of 802 feet, it's the third deepest Great Lake after Lakes Superior and Michigan. It averages 283 feet deep at 245 feet above sea level and has a flushing time of about six years.
Although it is similar in width and length, it holds about four times the water volume as its neighbor, Lake Erie.
There are a number of islands on the lake, including the Thousand Islands region, which is an archipelago of nearly 2,000 islands that line the US and Canadian border.
Many of the islands are small or even uninhabitable and the largest is Wolfe Island which is 48 square miles. About 1,400 live on Wolfe Island which has restaurants, a bakery, and a church.
Lake Ontario is probably the most polluted out of the five Great Lakes because all of the other lakes flow into it, including their pollution.
Because of the lake's depth and the warm weather that comes in from the southwest, Lake Ontario rarely freezes over. Water temperatures reach a high of about 75 degrees F. in August to about 37 degrees F. in February. The lake typically freezes just around the edges and from from mid-December to mid-April its harbors are closed.
The entire region around the lake is affected by lake-effect snow, but there is a snow belt along the southeastern shore that can get with 20 feet annually. The impact of the lake-effect snow can be felt as far as Syracuse, New York, which is one of the snowiest cities in the United States.
In 2015, one of the first propeller driven steamships on the Great Lakes was discovered. In 1862, the Bay State set out from Oswego, New York and was bound for Cleveland and Toledo when it sank in a ferocious storm.
The storm was so bad the captain turned back, but the ship began to tear a[art and when it sank it left a field of debris about a quarter of a mile along the bottom of the lake.
The lake is home to a large variety of fish (walleye, salmon, bass, and trout and even mussels. It's interesting that the lake also contains giant goldfish. They get in the water when they escape ponds during flooding and in the wild they can grow to a massive size. Typically they range in size from about 4-1/2 to 8-1/2 inches, but the really big ones can reach nearly 16 inches long.
A member of the carp family, goldfish have a lot of bones, but they are edible and enough people eat them to make them worth catching. The commercial catch is trucked live or shipped on ice to wholesale markets in Los Angeles and New York. By most accounts, the fish sell mostly in the Asian markets places.
The goldfish are almost entirely fished from Lake Erie though, not Lake Onatrio. The reason is that Lake Erie is the only Great Lake where the goldfish are found in great abundance.
Baseball's legendary home run hitter, Babe Ruth, hit his first home run ball into Lake Ontario. That happened in September of 1914, when he was playing at Hanlan’s Point Stadium and hit the ball from Toronto into the lake. This was also 19-year-old Babe Ruth’s first professional baseball game. It’s believed that the ball is still in the lake.
In 1954, 16-year-old Marilyn Bell swam across the lake in a competition. It tppk her almost 21 hours and she encountered waves up to 15 feet and eels attacked her arms and legs. In 1954 she became the youngest individual to swim across the English Channel.
The American Eel is the quintessential Lake Ontario fish. The snake-like fish, which can grow up to 3 feet long. is born in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda and then travels almost 900 miles to Lake Ontario and other inland freshwater bodies, then returns to the Sargasso Sea to spawn.
Due to nuclear power plants and dams there was a sharp decline in the eel population. In the 1980s from 25,000 per day were entering the lake, but by the 1990s the number had plummeted to 250 a day.
No comments:
Post a Comment