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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