UMD Grad Students Participates in Great Lakes Winter Research

DULUTH, MN – Student researchers and scientists at UMD and several other institutions recently gathered samples from across the Great Lakes to understand what is happening under the ice during the winter months.  It has been thought that the lakes lay dormant during the winter so most research is done during the summer months. The effort, known as “The Winter Grab”, is an attempt to get a clear picture of aquatic life during the winter and what role the ice cover plays in the annual cycle within the lakes.

“Imagine you’re reading a book and like half of it you just don’t read. So you know about summer, a lot, but winter we’re just gonna skip right. So it’s not the whole picture. The winter is actually giving us this piece of information that will create the whole picture of the entire season in the lakes,” said UMD graduate student Kirill Shchapov.

The samples they collected will tell researchers the amount of nutrients, algae, and microscopic life that is active during the winter and how it impacts aquatic life in the spring and summer.