Essential Science III Ground Water Is A Blessing

East of the 100th Meridian in the United States and in nearly all of Canada we have always taken abundant fresh water for granted. The Great Lakes, we used to learn in school, constitute the greatest inland waterway in the world, and is 750 miles long. Lake Superior alone holds three quadrillion gallons of fresh water, 10% of the world’s total. Together, the Great Lakes ecosystem contains 21% of the world’s fresh water. Canada, besides sharing the shoreline and much of the surface of the Great Lakes, has two million freshwater lakes of its own. Those lakes and rivers contain 20% of the world’s supply. There may be some overlap in these percentages, but the point is that we are blessed with a great quantity of fresh water in North America. Over the years, I have taken several steps backward into how the Midwest landscape got to be the way it is. The process went something like this.