Michigan Tech to build Traverse City freshwater research site

A planned working relationship with the Great Lakes Research Center, a 55,000-square-foot Michigan Tech facility on the banks of the Portage Canal in Houghton, could help the Freshwater Center quickly gain credibility and access to funding.

The center is a soft-funded research institution, meaning it receives no direct funding from Michigan Tech, said Great Lakes Research Director Timothy Havens. Its estimated $10 million annual budget for scientists and engineers comes from external sources, including the US Army and Navy, NSF, NOAA, and the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Current projects include:

Develop clean electrification for ferries and commercial shipping in the Straits of Mackinac;

Studying how microbial life in Lake Superior survives and thrives under the ice;

Converting microplastics in waterways into human food i

Using shore-based high-frequency radar to map the speed and direction of near-surface lake currents to direct search and recovery efforts, inform boats and smaller vessels of currents, and guide people to to the best fishing spots.

“You couple what we’re doing with the workforce development that NMC is doing, (and) that’s a win-win. Pushing the envelope,” Havens said. “There’s a trifecta between research at Michigan Tech, workforce development at the university and the culture of innovation in Traverse City, especially with 20Fathoms. It’s a flashpoint.”

The Havens center will work with the NMC Maritime Academy on various technologies that will power the next generation of Great Lakes cargo vessels, which will be largely autonomous.

“The big carriers will no longer have big crews. They will have skeleton crews,” he said. “I can imagine a captain sitting in an office in New York steering five ships remotely.”

Havens said the investigation could easily involve the Freshwater Center after it is up and running.

Another potential area of ​​research, according to Jason Slade, NMC’s vice president of strategic studies, is how to reduce the impact of quagga mussels, an invasive species that arrived in the ballast of ocean-going cargo ships and was first detected time in the Great Lakes basin to the lake. St. Clair in 1988.

“There are quadrillion quagga mussels in Lake Michigan, and each filter a liter of water a day,” he said. “That means the whole lake is drained in five days.”

That’s good for water clarity, he said, but the cleaner the water, the less nutrients are available to other species.

“They’re everywhere. You can go down 700 feet and find them,” he said. “The bottom of Lake Huron is a carpet of quagga muscles. There are a lot of people trying to figure out how to deal with them.”