Raiders of the Lost Lakes

The Seven Lakes Quest
Years ago I mapped out a global Grand Tour. My plan: to visit the largest freshwater lake on each of the seven continents.
In my academic research wet-dreams, I’d journey from the North America’s Great Lakes, to the South America’s Lake Titicaca, to Europe’s Lake Geneva, to Africa’s Lake Titicaca, to Asia’s Lake Baikal (the largest, deepest, clearest, and oldest lake on earth). And maybe even all the way to Antartica. That’s where one of Earth’s Largest Lakes was recently discovered hiding beneath more than a mile of solid ice.
I named my research junket the Seven Lakes Quest.
So when my research proposal was suddenly accepted it seemed like a dream come true. At first.
Then what began as a relaxing research junket soon became a desperate struggle for planetary survival.
Mysteriously, I had morphed from a mildly-mannered middle-aged college professor into an aging cartoon superhero. Like it or not, I was now locked in a global battle against the new Raiders of the Lost Lakes.
At stake was nothing less than the fate of the earth— with me cast as an aging, incompetent Hollywood action hero condemned to wrestle hopelessly with destructive planetary forces neither I, nor anyone else, fully understood.
Like history itself, my Seven Lakes wet dream had become a nightmare from which I could not seem to awake.
But with all that juicy research travel funding locked in, there was no going back now. So I nicknamed my new global research alter-ego Captain Aqua. And plunged in head-first.

Unlike Professor Indiana Jones, however, it wasn’t Nazis, global crime kingpins, or icy Cold War agents that I suddenly found myself fighting.
Instead my enemies had names like Climate Change, Invasive Species, Mercury Contamination, Radio-Nucleotide, Overfishing, Eutrophication, and Oxygen Desert.
Not to mention scar-faced-freaks like Aquatic Acidification, the dreaded Death Zone, and that evil nemesis known as Epic Drought.
Most frightening of all were those Gender-bending Hermaphroditic Fishes high on POPs, wielding castration knives. Eeek.
From Everest to Aquaman
When I was younger, all this would have seemed like just good old fightin’ fun. Having worked my way through college as a mountaineering instructor and adventure travel guide, I was used to roughing it. Bring it on! Who said being a college prof had to be boring?
Alas, as I soon discovered, it’s now been more than thirty years since I climbed Mount Everest back in grad school.
Correction: almostclimbed Mount Everest. Ahem.
As a member of the ill-fated 1985 American Mount Everest West Ridge Expedition (which failed just short of the summit), I had even shared a base camp cook tent with the first man on earth to complete the famous Seven Summits Expedition: a quest to be the first man ever to climb the highest peak on each of the seven continents. Everest included.
That man’s name was Dick Bass — a fifty-something Texas oil man with an Everest-sized ego (and a billionaire’s bank-account to match).
As all of us in Everest Base Camp soon discovered, Bass played a mean game of high altitude poker. Texas Hold’em. Fortunately for me, we only played for M&Ms, not cash.
Soon even my green ones were gone.
After numerous failed attempts at the summit, Dick Bass did finally manage to get his aging ass hauled to the summit —although half-carried by his loyal but chronically underpaid team of Sherpas.
Nevertheless bagging Everest soon instantly made Billioniare Bass world famous. And spawned an avalanche of imitators. A legion of wealthy amateur tourist-climbers with no climbing have been lining up by the hundreds to reach the summit Everest ever since.

Fortunately Dick Bass wasn’t the only Seven Summits pioneer I shared a tent with in 1985. In fact, my favorite Everest ’85 teammate — New Zealand climbing legend Rob “Mads” Anderson — soon made his own heroic bid to repeat Bass’s Seven Summit Quest: Solo. His climbing biography To Everest via Antarctica tells the whole story.

So hey, thought I, why not set out on a similar (if warmer!) Seven Lakes Expedition — a quest to visit the largest lake on each of the seven continents?
To hell with that whole over-hyped Seven Summits craze, cried I! Don Quixote never had it so good.
Having just published an award-winning book about Lake Tahoe, writing a book about the Seven Largest Lakes on Earth sounded like an excellent Encore.
To fund my fantasies, I filed an ambitious research request with my home campus at Foothill College, located in the heart of Silicon Valley. Lo and behond, it got approved.
But before I could so much as mutter “Thank you, Masked Man,” Captain Aqua was already in over his head, drowning in deep water.
With crushing speed, my cushy-sounding sabbatical morphed into an aging comic-book hero’s epic battle with climate-change-driven catastrophe — with me grown far too paunchy to fit gracefully into those old spandex superhero’s tights. And Earth itself teetering on the brink of The Sixth Extinction.
For unlike Professor Indiana Jones in the latest Raiders of the Lost Arcsequel, in the intervening 30 years since Everest I’d somehow put on 30 pounds. And lost the snap in my bullwhip.
The larger problem, of course, was our poor old embattled planet — which was in far worse shape than I was.
Tahoe Blues
Take Lake Tahoe for example — my own special area of academic expertise: Rescued from an unrestrained explosion of rampant development and unrestrained urbanization in the 1960s, for the next half-century the slogan “Keep Tahoe Blue” had remained a global rallying cry for environmentalists like me worldwide — inspiring equally idealistic conservation campaigns from Europe’s Lake Geneva to Russia’s Lake Baikal.

Much the same could be said for that former industrial cess-pool now known as the sparkling San Francisco Bay, my adopted home — where Save the Bay became our slogan.

Now cue the heroic soundtrack: What began as a local battle soon snowballed into a national crusade: culminating in passage of the U.S. Clean Water Act in 1972, a landmark piece of environmental legislation paradoxically signed into law by none other than a former California Congressman named Richard Nixon (with the unlikely support of a newly-elected ex-actor turned California Governor named Ronald Reagan).
These were precisely the bipartisan battles I’d once cut my teeth on as a young academic — first as a PhD student at Stanford, and later as an aspiring nature writer. Yet viewed from the 21st-Century, those epic eco-battles now seem quaint: like relics of a Lost Golden Age in which bipartisanship was powerful, pollution was local, and the eco-solutions we invented both swift and effective.
Better yet, the results of those battles were instantly, vibrantly visible to voters: in the form of crystal blue waters and clear blue skies. The Golden Age of American eco-activism had begun!
Then came Climate Change. Game over.
With brutal efficiency, Hurricane Katrina ushered us all into the 21st Century, nearly destroying a major American city in the blink of an eye — with help from Lake Ponchartrain. Face-to-face with climate chaos, even my beloved Lake Tahoe now seems almost fore-doomed to destruction, and all due to a non-stop plague of global drought, fire, invasive species, and dying forests.
To put it bluntly, nothing accomplished on a purely local level can possibly Keep Tahoe Blue much longer. This year, after decades of progress, Tahoe’s clarity tragically fell to the lowest levels ever measured since accurate record-keeping began in 1967, exactly fifty years ago.
Because here in the 21st Century, the most serious long-term threats to Lake Tahoe’s health and clarity come not from local pollution but from globalized threats such as planetary air pollution, invasive species, global warming, acidification, and climate change.
Tahoe isn’t alone. As Captain Aqua soon discovered, it’s roughly the same sad story for every other major (and minor) body of water on earth, from backyard ponds to the Great Lakes, from Africa to Australia, and from Arctic to the Amazon.
That’s the central coclusion of my research.
To quote the title of Naomi Klein’s 2015 book about Climate Change: This Changes Everything. Earth’s Largest Lakes included.
To cite just one example: up to 40% of all the particulate air pollution that now falls into Lake Tahoe on any given day comes direct from China — in an airborne witch’s brew laden with heavy metals, acids, nitrogen, and phosphorous. Meanwhile in 2015 California’s catastrophic drought cut the snowpack by an astounding 95%, leaving Tahoe’s legendary ski areas bone-dry and dusty, California agribusiness desiccated, and the surrounding national forests tinder-dry and dying . All due to invasive pine beetle infestations.
Meanwhile, much like the ailing forests which surround it, Lake Tahoe’s legendary waters have fallen victim to invasive species and exotic pollutants, with a host of noxious lake-choking critters and chemicals hitchhiking in from afar — even as Global Warming heats Tahoe’s formerly-icy waters to hot-tub heights.
The true tragedy, however, is that Tahoe’s crisis is not unusual.
Quite the opposite: Every large lake on earth is suffering from exactly the same global fever symptoms — or worse.
Aqua-calypse Now
Alas, it’s no exaggeration to say that Earth’s Largest Lakes are quite literally dying — rapidly, silently, invisibly, irreversibly — right before our very eyes.
The deeper problem is that most of us have our eyes shut tight.
In fact, several of Earth’s Largest Lakes are basically dead already: especially Lake Chad in Africa and Asia’s Ural Sea.


Both of these vast inland seas, long among the largest lakes on earth, are now so desiccated that more than 90% of their surface area has disappeared. What’s left is so pathetically polluted that nothing edible lives for long in what remains of their rotting corpses.

Other equally-enormous lakes look more like early-stage cancer patients with no visible symptoms. Yes, these lakes may still seem healthy on the surface, at least to a casual observer. Just like your friend with stage 4 terminal cancer might not really “look sick” yet either.
Climate Change is the Cancer that infects us all.
Similarly, since most of these threats remains largely invisible to casual tourists, most of the lovely vacation resorts lining famous lakeshores worldwide still host hordes of happy holiday-makers. All of them blissfully, willfully ignorant of the cloud of doom hanging over their much- beloved bodies of water.
So in stating bluntly that “Earth’s Great Lakes are dying,” am I just being a hair-brained academic eco-alarmist? A professorial Chicken-Little on sabbatical? Squawking “The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling”? A Little Boy who cried Wolf?
Dream on.
Like oncologists in a children’s cancer ward, all the Lake Scientists I interviewed during my global odyssey said the same thing.
Just as Tahoe’s most legendary lake scientist, Dr. Charles Goldman, has warned us bluntly now for fifty years: “Whatever happens to Lake Tahoe will eventually happen to us all.”
So it goes for every large lake on earth.
And so it goes, too, for our own imperiled human futures. It’s our own bodies — not just earth’s largest bodies of water bodies — that are threatened this time.
Granted, as all these “lake doctors” all concur, there is still hope of remission — perhaps even salvation! — especially given the full range of emerging new high-tech tools we now have to help with that healing.
Even so, I still can’t seem to shake the bone-chilling suspicion that Captain Aqua was in hopelessly over his head.
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