Jón Bjarnason Academy - 01.05.1936, Side 21

Lake Winnipeg—The Muddy Water
By H. C. KNOX, B.A.
Teacher of Chemistry, Daniel McIntyre School, Winnipeg.
We are all apt to think that which lies far away is interest-
ing and that which lies at our door is commonplace. When
we think of the great waters of the world, we never consider
those of Manitoba. The Great Lakes of Canada are those of the
St. Lawrence chain. It just never occurs to us that Lake Win-
nipeg has about two thousand more square miles than Lake
Ontario, and that it has its own interest in character and
history as well as the better advertised waters to the East.
So let us look at our lake to see what it is really like, and what
has been its story.
It is like a line dividing East from West. It belongs to
neither, for on one side is the level prairie stretching to the
Rockies while on the other is the Canadian Shield, reaching
to the Atlantic. The streams flowing in from the East are dark
and clear, while those from the West and South are the muddy
prairie rivers. All of these drain an immense area. It stretches
on the West to the crests of the Rockies, on the East nearly
to Lake Superior while to the south its head waters mingle
with those of the Mississippi five hundred miles away. Slowly
these southern and western rivers are filling up the lake and
some geologic ages hence this pale descendant of Lake Agassiz,
which covered 110,000 square miles to its nine thousand will
be a duck haunted marsh.
It has two main differences from the Eastern lakes. It
has nowhere a greater depth than one hundred feet while the
average is not much more than ten feet. Lake Superior is
nearly a thousand feet deep. The other great difference is the
muddiness of its waters. It is those prairie streams that make
it dirty, although its shallowness also helps, the bottoms being
stirred by every storm.
That lesser depth does not mean that it is a safer lake
than the Eastern ones, but rather that it is the more to be
feared. Deep waters stir slowly with the storm and the waves
move in long rollers. The Winnipeg shallows are quickly
roused and the waves go in short sharp breakers which wash
over a small boat. The history of the lake has been one of
disaster ever since the days of the birch bark.
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i That shallow water, however, means that it warms up much
more quickly than deeper lakes. Superior with its thousand
feet is always cold, hut give Winnipeg a month of warm weather