Posted on 10/02/2025 12:25:37 PM PDT by Red Badger
Researchers and filmmakers are exploring the Superior Shoal, an underwater mountain in Lake Superior. (Courtesy of Inspired Planet Productions)
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* There is an underwater mountain in the middle of Lake Superior
* Scientists and filmmakers think it could be a hotbed for aquatic life
* They’re using underwater drones to document the volcanic mound
* Known to some as the “Freshwater Everest,” if you want to explore this mountain, you don’t go up, you go down.
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In the middle of Lake Superior, near the boundary between Canadian and US waters, sits the Superior Shoal, a mountain that’s completely underwater.
The shoal is about 4 square miles of volcanic rock that rises up from the bottom of the lake to a height nearly three times that of the Statue of Liberty. Its peak wrests about 30 feet below the surface.
The shoal, a term used to describe areas of shallow water, was first charted in 1929.
Now, filmmakers and researchers are exploring it with underwater drones. They want to see if it’s a hotbed for aquatic life that could offer a refuge for species facing obstacles elsewhere in the Great Lakes.
“This is an area that has very, very rarely been explored on camera,” said Zach Melnick, a cofounder of Inspired Planet Productions, which he runs with his business partner and wife, Yvonne Drebert.
It’s not the only underwater incline in the Great Lakes. Others include Stannard Rock, a reef in Lake Superior north of Marquette; a knoll outside Tobermory, Ontario in Lake Huron; and Midlake Reef in Lake Michigan, between Muskegon and Milwaukee. And it’s not the only “Superior Shoal.” There’s another located in the St. Lawrence River off the shore of New York.
But Drebert and Melnick believe the Superior Shoal in Lake Michigan is the largest known underwater mountain in fresh water.
Documenting aquatic life with a swimming robot
The filmmakers had been curious about lake protrusions after exploring one that appeared to be an outlier of aquatic life while filming their series and related documentary, “All Too Clear: Beneath the Surface of the Great Lakes.” Those works dive deep into how invasive mussels in the Great Lakes are gobbling up essential nutrients and devastating organisms, from plankton to whitefish.
A drone is seen underwater
The Boxfish Luna, the underwater drone filmmakers are using to help document aquatic life on the Superior Shoal. (Courtesy of Inspired Planet Productions) When a researcher they’d worked with in the past, Michael Rennie, got a grant to explore the Superior Shoal, they “sort of begged him,” Melnick said, to let them come along.
Rennie is an associate professor at Lakehead University and a research fellow at the International Institute for Sustainable Development-Experimental Lakes Area. Now, with the help of the filmmakers’ cameras, he’s looking into whether the Superior Shoal might be a hotspot for life, which he said is often the case for similar seamounts found in the ocean.
What they’re essentially studying, Rennie said, is “how the physics of having this giant mountain in a bunch of water that’s swirling around all the time interacts with things like nutrients, and with the growth of algae, to promote the abundance of fish that we seem to be seeing out there.”
Melnick and Drebert are operating special cinema-grade cameras to monitor aquatic life like zooplankton, algae and fish. The drone they use is called a Boxfish Luna and it can go around 1,600 feet deep, about the length of five football fields.
“Think of aerial drones, take all that cool technology, and put it in a robot that you’re shoving underwater,” Drebert said. “But our drone is a little bit special because it can swim in any direction, just like a fish.”
Usually, it takes a little while for fish to get used to the swimming drone, Melnick said, but fish near the Superior Shoal seemed to be curious. “The trout out there were ultra amenable to being on camera,” he said.
At one point, while the team was livestreaming video, they tried to measure fish with two laser points. The fish chased the glowing red dots the same way cats do.
They also saw hydra, which are kind of like freshwater anemones, attached to rocks, giving the effect of a garden.
“They are little tiny aquatic animals that wave in the wind,” said Drebert. “They use their little hairy tentacles to pull food, like little zooplankton and critters, out of the water.”
Ripe for conservation?
Rennie said the data collected on the recent trip has not been fully analyzed yet. But, if research shows that the Superior Shoal is a magnet for aquatic life, then maybe it and places like it could serve as refuges for near-shore populations dealing with environmental or human-caused problems.
“And, if that’s the case, then I think we’ve got really good arguments to be made for maybe we should think about affording these regions a higher conservation status,” Rennie said.
Melnick and Drebert are planning to use footage taken from the Superior Shoal in a documentary they’re developing about lakemounts as well as a wildlife docuseries they’re working on.
Hydra, underwater plant-looking creatures, are seen on the side of a rock formation underwater Filmmakers and researchers found rocks covered in hydra while exploring the Superior Shoal, an underwater mountain in Lake Superior. (Courtesy of Inspired Planet Productions)
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If you want to hear more about the filmmakers’ work, they’ll be speaking with other panelists at a free screening of their last documentary, “All Too Clear,” happening 7 p.m. Oct. 8 at the Detroit Film Theatre at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Bridge Michigan environment reporter Kelly House will moderate the panel. The underwater drone will also be on display.
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The big lake is the head end of the Great Midcontinental Rift.
One of the known largest buildups of lava on earth
That rift runs all the way to OK and, most likely, beyond on the west and most likely all they way down to AL on the east...they just dont know yet. But the west is confirmed.
The earthquakes that happen around OK and MO etc, is likely caused by fault lines caused by the ice depressing that area in the last ice age and now is rebounding.
If you go to Eagle Harbor in the UP of Michigan, you can stand on the southern edge of that rift...the earths crust is exposed. Meaning if you try and dig to get below the rock you wont be able to do it. The rock is tilted at about a 25 degree angle. The northern edge is at about Isle Royal. The rock tilts the other way there. The ancient rift is in the lake there.
I watched videos of “ice shoves” off of one of these lakes and it was horrifying. Shards of ice stacked several feet deep coming into a neighborhood.
Stuff of nightmares.
Depending on where they were located on the mountain: perhaps, but perhaps not.
Well, the drab coloring is correct, LOL!
WOW. I’ve jumped in that freezing cold water many times.
The glaciers were around a mile thick. Where do you think the lakes came from?
I see that. Everything I learned about fish was at the Fresh Water Fish Display at Cabela’s, LOL!
No, I had a loving Grandpa who took me fishing. And I had to bait my own hook, and I had to clean my own fish, and I got to help cook them. Friday Night at Big Silver Lake was ALWAYS a Fish Fry. Then later, Ice Cream! Yay!
I also had to learn the common name AND the Latin/Genus for whatever fish I caught. (Yellow Perch, Sunfish, Pumpkinseed, Bluegill.)
And if he had to yell at me for something dumb I did - “Get your hook baited and get it back in the water! They’re biting! They’re not just gonna JUMP into the boat!” just remember:
There’s No Crying In Fishing!
And he and Dad taught me to play Cribbage when I was four and could hold my hand of cards properly and count/add to 31.
Likewise: There’s No Crying In Cribbage!
I know where they came from: They were hollowed out by the glaciers, of course, but obviously the mountains around them were not flattened by them. My comment presumed these mountains were still above ground before the lakes were filled with water after the glaciers receded.
Yes it did. Three times the height of the Statue of Liberty.
Very wise, fwdude.
Superior is one mean b*tch.
Dad built aa A frame house on Lac LaBelle which connects into Lake Superior. That was our summer vacation every year growing up. Mom was born and raised on a farm just outside of Kearsarge.
Were you able to get your pants clean? 😉😂😂
One summer, it got in the '90s for three weeks.
It was warm down about ten feet - but there was a layer of cold water below that.
Until the wind shifted to coming in off the lake...
What is the draft on the larger vessels?
Underwater Native American sites in the Great Lakes region include significant prehistoric hunting structures discovered beneath Lake Huron and Lake Michigan, dating back approximately 9,000 to 10,000 years.
Thanks!
The injuns arrived from the Bering Land Bridge about the time that the glaciers were melting. They would not have been too cozy living beneath a melting glacier. Drip, drip, drip. Ugg, fire go out again. Sure, they lived along the edges and built primitive camps.
Yes, and I always enjoyed spending hours looking for agates on the beach. Thimbleberry jam is the greatest jam I’ve ever tasted.
Regarding Lac LaBelle,do you remember weather showman Sonny Elliott having a little squeaky button on the board and he’d say “Lac LaBelle, which is right about (squeak) here!
ABSOLUTELY! Thanks. So many great childhood memories. ❤️
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