The Latest Breaking News from Great Lakes

Many North Americans plan to travel this summer to catch up on lost experiences, following two years of COVID-19 lockdowns and restrictions. This so-called revenge travel has the potential to raise the number of drownings, as more people choose to enter the water, even when the conditions aren’t ideal.

The Great Lakes cover nearly 95,000 square miles (250,000 square kilometers) and hold over 20% of Earth’s surface fresh water. More than 30 million people in the U.S. and Canada rely on them for drinking water. The lakes support a multibillion-dollar maritime economy, and the lands around them provided many…

An all-hands-on-deck approach is critical to ensuring all Chicagoans, and everyone across the Great Lakes region, has access to clean, safe, affordable drinking water.

DETROIT — PFAS pollutants ride rivers across the Midwest and Canada to get to the Great Lakes. But not in the way a pair of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers studying the forever chemicals expected, and that could impact how environmental officials regulate the chemicals.

CHICAGO -- Some Chicago birds are nesting nearly a month earlier than they did more than a century ago. And like some other shifts happening around the Great Lakes region as temperatures rise and the timing of the natural world drifts, there’s a familiar driver: climate change.

CHICAGO — As ice coverage across the Great Lakes falls from winter highs with spring and summer warming ahead, Lake Michigan is likely to end up with a just-below-average season.

"These sites were dangerously polluted for decades," Biden acknowledged. "We're committed to clean them up."

CHICAGO — A group of scientists walked out on to frozen Lake Michigan to do something they’ve done time and again throughout the Great Lakes: collect water.

Scientists have fanned out across the Great Lakes' frozen surfaces to learn what happens underwater during winter