How will communities along the coasts of the Great Lakes respond to climate change induced water level extremes?

This is the question at the heart of Lentic Futures//Death’s Door. While climate change has caused sea levels to rise and threatens coastal communities with near constant inundation, Great Lakes communities situated around the north and midwest of the United States face a far more variable and uncertain future. The starkly enforced dichotomy between land and water that these communities (and basically the entirety of the western world) have depended on has quickly begun to crumble, leading to a new paradigm in which much of the “land” is neither exclusively land nor water. Instead, it operates in a space between, shifting temporally between one or the other.  

Seasonal and decadal variation in water level is a normal part of Great Lakes hydrology, but climate change has supercharged this variation. In the years leading up to 2013-2014, water levels on the Great Lakes had reached record lows. This is largely thought to be a result of the unusually strong 1997-1998 El Niño event that in turn caused a much milder series of winters along the Great Lakes. These milder winters increased water temperature, subsequently increasing the amount of evaporation occurring over the lakes and lowering their water level. This created a positive feedback loop, where low water levels lead to higher water temperature, which in turn lead to greater rates of evaporation, thus leading to even lower water levels. These extreme lows impeded navigation, hurt tourism, stranded wetlands, and reduced hydroelectric generation. Much of my childhood was spent in this period, watching every year as water lines along the various docks around Door County receded further and further and inlets that I had once kayaked with ease became choked with mud and plants.

 This trend of warmer winters continued until the winter of 2013-2014, at which point a large polar vortex made its way through the midwest and broke this loop. This polar vortex dramatically increased ice coverage in the lakes, reducing evaporation rates. This, in combination with increased snowmelt that spring, resulted in a significant rise in Great Lakes water level, with record highs being reached in the spring of 2017. In the reverse of the previous feedback loop, these high water levels lead to reduced evaporation rates and therefore even higher water levels. Such high water levels eroded beaches and bluffs, caused flooding, inundated wetlands, and destroyed sensitive habitat. The feeling of hope that filled me as I watched water levels return to normal the first couple years after 2014 has quickly been replaced by similar dread surrounding the uncertainty of my community. This dread was accompanied by a realization that “normal” as it relates to water level, daily temperature, or climate as a whole has become untethered from the lived reality.  

Lentic Futures//Death’s Door is a combination of visual and narrative storytelling that examines how aspects of these communities may shape and reshape as a result of this continued variation, with a situated focus on Door County, Wisconsin. Located on the Door Peninsula that juts out into Lake Michigan, the area was nicknamed Porte des Mortes (Death’s Door) for the dangerous currents in the strait between the tip of the peninsula and the nearby Washington Island. Climate change presents Door County, and numerous other Great Lakes communities, with new challenges beyond treacherous tides. 

Having spent the first 18 years of my life there and since becoming a frequent visitor, I have witnessed the oscillation between water level extremes firsthand and seen the risks that they create. To present these extremes within Lentic Futures//Death’s Door, I have separated out three key aspects  (1. Rookery Habitats, 2. Municipalities, 3. Wetlands) that are threatened by extreme water level variation. Through the narrative arc created for each aspect I have aimed to construct a story of how each may be altered by such extremes, how humans may choose to respond, and how our responses may then be shaped by further variation. 

Paralleling the written narratives are the works themselves, which provide a glimpse into what this future may look like and the continued struggle with unpredictability that will be faced. Scenes that are at one point shown as having been flooded are then recreated in a different point in time once water has receded. This also lets me show how the Door County community might choose to respond over time. Acts such as the building of man-made islands for rookeries (as in Manual Island) and seawalls for protection against flooding (as in Lost Boat) are shown, underscoring how they shape the community and respond to the water level variation itself. References to variability are also woven throughout the structure of individual pieces. This is most obviously found in the jagged blue line embedded in the water of Manual Island, representing the stochastic shifts in Great Lakes water level that can be seen throughout the many graphs that track such data. Similar stochastic lines are implemented into many of my other pieces, such as in Merganser Chase where they connect the movement of birds, and Rangelight 1-3 where they act as a border drawing attention to a hydrologic-based shift in plant species. These stories, while embellished with semi-fictional accounts of the future, are grounded in real and concrete concerns of community members and reflect actual proposed or completed mitigation efforts.