Ice caps melt, rivers dry

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by Kristian Gravenor

According to Environment Canada, greenhouse gases have turned our north into a baked Alaska. So why is it, then, that instead of overflowing with melted ice, the St. Lawrence is rapidly becoming as shallow as the trendy, eponymous main boulevard? "The melted [polar] ice is going to the sea," says Peter Yee, of Environment Canada. "The Great Lakes are above sea level and they're fed by rainfall and snow." But where are the heavy rains that are supposed to go hand in hand with global warming? "The rain's falling but it's just not falling where we need it," says Yee, who notes that the Great Lakes only received half of the normal average rainfall in July.

And less turns fresh to mess. "You don't have as much water to dilute industrial affluent. Plus water gets warmer and that promotes bacteria growth. And if you're an industry it'll cost you more for electricity to pump water to your plants because your pump has to work harder to pump it higher."

Before leaving their ports of call, foreign ships check the depth of the St. Lawrence. When the river's low they don't load as much. "They lose money and the Port of Montreal loses money because the lighter the ship, the less money the Port can charge, " says Flavio D'Agnolo of the Canadian Coast Guard. He says that the St. Lawrence water level can be increased slightly by fiddling with the Moses-Saunders N.Y.-Ontario hydroelectric dam at Cornwall, but that'll likely be done only this fall.