Feb. 2019: Here's how your ideas could help save Lake Superior's Buffalo Reef

GAY — A slow-moving environmental catastrophe unfolding in Lake Superior starts beneath the shadow of an old smokestack.

That’s where the Mohawk Mining Co. left a heaping pile of waste when it shuttered its stamp mill 86 years ago in the far western Upper Peninsula. As much as 23 million metric tons of crushed rock sat along the shore — enough to fill more than 1.4 million commercial dump trucks today. Line up those trucks end to end, and the queue would stretch more than 7,000 miles, circling more than a quarter of the globe.

Whittled down by winds and waves, the pile now weighs in at 2.4 million metric tons (more than 150,000 trucks) and is shrinking. But none of the dark, coarse sands actually vanished.

Instead, they’ve seeped into the lake, bringing along metals like arsenic and copper – as well as the potential to decimate fisheries and a way of life for Native American tribes who rely on them along the Keweenaw Peninsula.

“It’s a man-made natural disaster,” said Jeff Ratcliffe, executive director of the nonprofit Keweenaw Economic Development Alliance. “People have been kind of ignoring it for a long time.”