Here’s an excerpt from a Boston Globe article about Walden Pond (bold added for emphasis).
As the climate changes, the water is expected to get warmer, which will favor algae that make the water murkier. The warmth also helps more phosphorus, a key nutrient for the algae, escape from the sediment at the bottom, he said.
“Phosphorus is a fertilizer. You put it on a crop, the crop grows better. . . . You put it in a lake, the algae grow better,” he said.
The other problem with the warmer temperatures is that it will lure more people seeking relief from the heat to the pond, “and a certain percentage of them pee,” he said. Previous studies have found that half the phosphorus in the lake in the summer comes from human urine.
Is there any reason to suspect that this wouldn’t be just as true at Crystal Lake?
Maybe worse? I suspect Crystal Lake is shallower and, therefore, will warm faster.
I’ve long suspected that the toddler section of Crystal Lake is 50% pee.
Well no worries since I’m sure the rope that marks off the toddler section keeps the pee from esaping to the rest of the lake.
To me this argues the merits for letting people swim anywhere around the lake so that the pee is dispersed and not concentrated in one area 🙂
Walden Pond = 108 feet deep
Crystal Lake = 20-30 feet deep
With residential runoff carrying excess fertilizer and waste into Crystal Lake, it has a lot more in common with a storm drain than with Walden Pond and has a lot more than pee to worry about.
Nothing’s changed since I was a kid. We used to call it “Pisstal Lake” for reasons I won’t elaborate on. A year or so back, the Concord Historical Society featured an exhibition of detailed daily weather and change of season observations that Henry David Thoreau compiled at Walden and the Concord area generally. The comparison was pretty easy to make because so much of Concord is still in the open space state it was in at the time Thoreau trudged all parts of Concord and neighboring communities. It was clear that (Despite this year’s weather), spring is arriving several weeks earlier now than it did then and we are having longer autumns before winter sets in.