Methane in the Ice - It's always been there, pumping out of the Earth

Well, here's a shock and something you NEVER, EVER hear being addressed by all the climate change experts.  CO2 is bad for the earth -well, except for all the plants that need abundant CO2 to live - but that doesn't count.  Then, when CO2 loses its shock value, we talk seriously about methane.  Millions of dollars in federal grants have been spent on studies of bovine flatulence - cow farts.  Apparently, the beef industry,  (you know, those people who supply those little round patties at McDonalds)  has been killing Earth with bovine flatulence and something needs to be done, apparently.  At least another million dollar study needs to play out for a good determination of all that ails this greatly suffering rock.

Bearing the weight of mankind in mind, Delilah was bugging me to go outside for a run.  That little dog likes to burn up the ground, and she's been know to produce the occasional methane burst herself now and then, but that's for a different study.

Anyway, I hopped on the Skidoo and took the little dog out to where my dad and I were fishing earlier that day.  We wandered around out there enjoying the peace and tranquility of Minnesota's great northwoods and I remembered to point out the methane bubbles in the ice.  For the last few years, Jasper Lakes has been belching up methane a LOT.  I'm sure that Jasper is not alone in doing so, but it's where I am all the time so I observe these things in this lake.

Funny part is that the water is about 1 foot low this winter.  This past fall we had more beach than I'd seen all summer with the water being low so pulling the docks out was a bit easier.  Out where we ice  fish in the weed beds, over the years, it has been 7 to 8 feet deep only.  Last summer, the weeds were SO thick, you could barely fish.  It also looked like silt is filling in the lake.  Top it all off with a few really big methane "burps" and I have a theory.

Jasper Lake is maintained mainly by spring activity.  It also has a ton of silt that none of our neighboring lakes have, and that includes even Ojibway which sends water to Jasper via Jasper Creek.  In 1976, that creek dried up for 1.5 years and Jasper dropped 4 feet low and stayed there with water going out still.  There is only one way that is possible.  Springs.

Bearing that in mind, these springs are geological events.  Parameters and conditions deep in the ground can change due solely to the actions of Mother Nature.  The planet does what it wants and that's it.  We can wring our hands and raise taxes and implement ridiculous feel-good mandates all we want, but we have zero effect on whatever the planet decides to do next despite what the believers conclude by consensus.  Jasper Lake has been filling up with sediment.   The only incoming water comes from a spring-fed lake (Ojibway) with no sediment.  So, where is the sediment coming from?  Well it has to be coming from those springs that maintain the lake for real.  Something changed below, and those springs are dumping minerals and sediment into the lake from far away

That is the first part of my theory.  The second part lies in the fact that methane can be made from serpentinization of rock in the presence of water.  The right rocks rub each other at ungodly pressures below with some water mixed in and we get methane building up.  (You can look it up-it happens all the time)  Plus, weeds, fish and bacteria rot on the bottom to form methane as well, but the serpentization method makes more sense regarding the massive volume needed to affect this lake.  It happens everywhere around the planet and methane silently releases after the pressure  builds up, all the time.  Al Gore seems to leave that part and so do all the other enforcers of climate change belief.

The second part of my theory ties it all together in Jasper Lake.  Where we fish, it has been about 7-8 feet deep historically for the last several years.  This year, it was 10 feet deep.  Deeper than we've seen it since I was a kid.  We've also had more methane bubbles frozen in the ice than I have ever seen.  This could also explain why I fell through the ice last winter when all the other ice was good.  We fish in that same area all the time where methane can be observed bubbling up in significant volume with an underwater camera.  It flows up out of the silt and is very visible on camera.

My theory is that we had, deep under silt, maybe hundreds of feet down, a large methane bubble building for years coming out of those springs that maintain the lake.  The bubble or concentration built up pressure and lifted the silt up, thereby lowering the water level by default. Lifting up of the bottom of the lake, allowed the weeds to grow thicker than ever because they were closer to the sun than ever before.  Once that huge bubble got close enough to the surface of the silt layer, it began to bubble up in the water and some of it got trapped in the ice allowing me to formulate this theory.  When enough bubbled out in a lake (that was 1 foot low to begin with), the silt settled back down, and my dad and I are now fishing bluegills in 10 feet of water instead of 7 feet in a lake that is low in the first place.

So, a large methane bubble formed deep enough to be trapped by the silt that becomes denser as you go deeper due to pressure and gravity packing the silt into a fairly impervious carpet - to a point.  The gas bubble lifted the entire bottom of the lake up, the weeds grew like crazy because they were closer to the sun.  Then, the gas released when it overrode the density of the silt, and the bottom has now gone back down closer to pre-bubble years.  

Meanwhile, Mother Earth has just released perhaps millions of tons of methane into the air and no cows were present.   Maybe I could get my Congressman to give me a million dollar grant to study this theory about naturally occurring phenomenon with the "evil" methane being released.

Here's some video:

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Born to Run

Delilah, the resort dog of Northwind Lodge (well, and Cookie, too, but Cookie is a bit boring) lieks to run against the Skidoo.  You can just see the bird-dog look she gets when I start the machine.  She takes off for home every time.  Fun dog.

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Bluegills and U-boats in Jasper Lake

Using what whatever snow is left in the yard to get the Skidoo to the water, I drove out on the ice on Jasper Lake  on March 16 at 1:30 PM to set up a pup-up shelter for fishing.  It was warm out at about 40 degrees but like every other March, it was windy.   Blowing from the south, then the north, we ended up tying the 6 x 8 pop-up off from each end to my Skidoo and my dad's 4-wheeler.  We were 100 yards off the beach of Northwind Lodge.

We made use of pre-drilled holes from the day before when we went fishing with Dave Oliver and Paul Haraldson, so setting up was quick.  We got inside the tent along with Delilah and began paying homage to the gods of bluegills by staring down the hole.  Boy, talk about getting a sore upper back and neck after doing that for 4 hours straight.

We dropped down various jigs a sparkly little spinners and they began to come in.  There were fewer today, but they were running bigger.  Nice sized, fillet-able fish swimming 5 to 7 feet below.  Today's visibility was not as good as yesterday and we can never understand why. 

Conditions were about the same with a partly cloudy day, but nonetheless, the sunnies below were bigger and a bit more picky.  All of a sudden, a 5 lb northern pick glided across in the shallow depths below.  The sunnies blew the popstand at that point and then some really nice sized largemouth bass came in for a look.  Even though the sunnies are good sized, those bass come in and they are huge.  2.5 to 4  pounders stopping in to see if they want that tiny #14 tungsten jig with a little bit of plastic on the hook.  It gets your adrenalin flowing because these are really nice fish. But nope, they swam by. After all that fish activity going by, it takes the bluegills about 30 minutes to come back after the head bluegill declares the coast to be clear.

I have 5 rods on the ice floor of our living room on the lake.  Each is rigged with a different jig & different plastics.  Most of the stuff I use is tungsten.  When the school is passing through, one must keep their interest for them to stick around.  So, if they are slow moving to one lure, crank up fast and drop another.  Must have been the air-pressure, but they were only moderately interested in what we were offering.  There was my dad setting the hook and saying "aarrggh!" and and me doing the same while declaring  "dang it!".  The fish below would suck in a jig completely. To hook them requires an immediate hookset.  You're like a coiled spring with a trip wire.  Trouble is that inexplicably, you can set the hook and miss them time and again despite their having inhaled the entire jig.  We call it "flipping them"  when we set a hook and it pulls them up and they flip a sideways somersault and swim away dazed but unharmed.  To avoid frequent flipping, we tried letting them take it for one second and they spit it out in slightly less than one second.  Their little bluegill tongues must quickly identify plastic.  We finally moved to tungsten bead head flies made by Cortland with no plastic and caught a few, flipped a few more.

Then, in a blast of sunfish panic, those slow-moving fish dispersed in all directions like spokes on a bicycle wheel.  Big northern coming through like a German U-boat on the hunt.  The bluegills beneath his level could hear the "ping" as the big green U-boat glided methodically overhead.  To hide, they descended deeper & deeper, closer to the bottom, holding their breath, beads of sweat rolling off their gill covers.  Minutes changed to hours as that big predator swam between them and the two faces staring down the holes in the ice above watching and waiting.  And waiting. And waiting.

Dang northern scared everybody off.  We sat for another 30 minutes with 5 bluegills on the ice and nobody was returning back to that spot.  My dad and I finally gave up.  We knocked down the tent, loaded the sled and cranked up our machines and headed home.   Had we caught every fish we saw including some very large perch, we'd have had fish laying all over the ice.  There certainly is no shortage of fish in Jasper.  Keeping them on the hook is the tricky part.