Lake Erie - Turnover

Today we started our drive northward to Niagara Falls. I was pretty concerned about driving a rental car, as about 6 inches of snow fell overnight.

There is an English person somewhere reading this who, after seeing the word "snow", has descended into a mad flurry of panic. He/she has dashed to the shops to buy tinned goods and coal enough to last the year, called relatives to say final goodbyes before the power cuts out and, of course, fired off a polite email to work letting them know that despite their best efforts, transit will be simply impossible.

To this English person: DO NOT PANIC. The snow in question has most probably melted by now, and was never in your country to begin with.

In my humblest of opinions, America fails to function well under many circumstances. Snow, however, is not one of them. All roads (including motorways) and paths were promptly cleared as soon as we woke up, making the drive north extremely straightforward.

After about two hours driving we took a slight detour to Erie and continued on to the tip of a peninsula on the south-east side of the lake. I saw what appeared to be a floating log, but after a second glance was actually a fisherman. Naturally, we stopped to ask him what the bloody hell he was playing at, trying to catch fish waste deep in these sub-glacial waters.

I walked out onto the sandy shores, and was greeted by the overwhelming stench of dead fish, followed by the horrific realisation that the sand I was standing on was not, in fact sand, but more fish at a later stage of decomposition.

The fisherman proceeded to explain how this was a yearly occurrence called turnover, where the (relatively) warm surface water cools, becoming more dense and sinking to the bottom of the lake, killing a large proportion of its residents.

I expect evolution is pretty swift in these parts.