The Vanishing Waters of Gull Lake

Hello, I'm Danica.

Hello, I'm Grace. We are both grade eight students at Glendale Sciences and Technology School, in Red Deer, Alberta.

We decided to do our project on the declining water levels of Gull Lake. The reason we chose to look into it because we both have personal connections to the lake, and have noticed first hand the drastic changes to the beach, which is a direct result of the declining water levels.

The water levels of Gull Lake have been decreasing over the past 100 years since 1920, Which is effecting not only the home owners but also the ecosystem and marine life surrounding the lake as well as tourism in the area. Our plan is to inform people about the problems facing Gull Lake and how we could all help improve the water quality as well as the declining water levels.

The main positive impact of our project is raising awareness about the possible solutions and how we all can help. Our main focus is sharing information on the future pumping of water from a nearby river into the lake and drilling into the Haynes aquifer located 280 meters below the surface.

We both have family out at Gull Lake which is where we spent lots of our time during summers. Spending time at Gull Lake has helped us experience firsthand the effects of Gull Lakes declining water levels. This includes marine life, aquatic vegetation, shorebirds and recreational usage of the lake. These reasons have inspired us to research possible solutions including the exploration of the Haynes aquifer and the history of previous attempts at restoring lake water levels.

The main positive impact of our project is that it will help raise awareness about the issues facing Gull Lake by looking into the solutions. Our hope is that by doing so the water would be restored to a healthy level, and it would improve the overall ecosystem of the lake and the watershed surrounding it. Some additional impacts include; the residents around Gull Lake will have access to a larger water supply, as well as property values will go up to what it used to rather than decline as they have been, along with the animals in the area will have a healthier habitat.

We plan to help the lake by informing people about the problems facing Gull Lake and the possible solutions. In addition, we plan on tracking the water levels through the spring and into the summer.

If we are able to help the water levels of Gull Lake improve this could prove helpful to other water sources in the world who are also seeing declining water levels.

We got most of our information from the Gull Lake Watershed Society(GLWS), along with speaking with the current president of the GLWS, Steve Murray, where we gathered a lot of our information surrounding topics such as the pumping from the Blindman River, or potentially drilling into the Haynes aquifer.

Gull Lake's water levels have been dropping since 1910 and they have been monitoring the levels since 1924. Through their tests we have learned that the levels have dropped on average 2.3 inches a year. As a result the Gull Lake Watershed Society used to pump water from the blindman river, and their license allowed them to relocate 5 million cubic meters of water from the river into the lake. Each cubic meter holds 1,000 liters of water. Despite that preposterous amount of water put into the lake, every year it only raises the lake by 7cm. But with evaporation it takes about 2 cm, make our yearly water income 5cm.They then realized that by pumping water from the Blindman River they were introducing an invasive species called Prussian Carpe into the lake. It is detrimental to the ecosystem because they reproduce asexually and pose a threat to the native species. Due to the invasive species they stopped pumping in 2018.

Gull Lake's water level is getting dangerously low and if this continues we could have a real problem on our hands. The old pump didn’t work due to prussian carp and their eggs travelling through, so the new pump will help the lake's health and water level while also filtering the water.

The other solution is to pump water from the Haynes aquifer, which is below the aquifer where all our drinking water and water that we use for agriculture comes from. We are limited on the amount of water we can pump from the Blindman River, the aquifer is an untapped water source that is estimated to contain about 15 billion cubic meters of freshwater.  Drilling would go through the shallow aquifer through the aquitard about 900 feet to reach the Haynes aquifer. Accessing the Haynes wouldn't effect farmers, nearby communities or private wells in Central Alberta. We would be the first to pump from there in Canada.

Our plan to help is to participate in water level and quality testing in the spring while informing people about the threats that face Gull lake.

We would like to get more people involved and informed about the problems facing Gull Lake, like distributing flyers. We would like to continue this project by collaborating with the GLWS assisting with measuring and monitoring water levels, water quality tests throughout the year. We wish we could’ve gotten involved sooner, this could've led to the word spreading quicker and we could’ve had more data to compare. It would’ve been beneficial for us to look at different lakes in Canada who are having the same problem and see what they are doing to fix it.

We would like to give a special thanks to Steve Murray(president of the GLWS) and Daniel Rietsma (our grade eight science teacher at GSTS) for all of their help, guidance, support, and constructive criticism that helped shape our project. We would also like to give a quick thanks to both of our parents, who provided support when needed, along with the judges at CARSF(Central Alberta Regional Science Fair) for giving us notes and feedback.

We got most of our information from Steve Murray who is the President of the Gull Lake Watershed Society who we met with frequently.

PrussainCarp-FactSheet

Initiatives to save Gull Lake

National Post

Document HCL-Groundwater Evaluation published October 24, 2024

https://www.gulllakewatershed.org/

www.alberta.ca