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Message: <blockquote data-quote="LazarusLong42" data-source="post: 916098" data-attributes="member: 9620">I like the idea, but there are several difficulties with it:First, just damming the Niagara river won't do what you're wanting to do.  You'd have to effectively create a dam some nineteen feet high that stretched across the entire river basin--a hunred miles perhaps--otherwise, in the stretch of time you're talking about, the water will just find a different way to flow downhill.  (Probably by reclaiming the Welland Canal, as you noted, and simply turning it into another set of falls).Second, the upper lakes are already internavigable, as someone said.  The four (or five, if you count the bulge in the Detroit River that some people call Lake St. Clair) upper lakes have no locks between them except at Sault Ste. Marie.  Natural reclamation at the Soo Locks and erosion at St. Mary's Falls would actually drop the level of Lake Superior over thousands of years.Third--and perhaps this isn't so much a problem as an alternate solution--many of the areas you're talking about flooding are effectively swampland anyway.  Toledo, for instance, was built over the Black Swamp.  General estimates are that, if humans suddenly stopped maintaining the drainage systems that keep Toledo above the water table, Toledo would be a swamp again in about 50 years... perhaps less.  Likewise much of Northern Ohio, Southeast Michigan, the entire area on the low side of Sault Ste. Marie, and much of the Western shore of Lake Michigan.Now, all that mostly negative said, a different idea.  Global warming runs rampant, ocean levels rise.  This will also cause an increase in the mositure level of the atmosphere, and cause an increase in precipitation over much of the world.  More rain falling into the Great Lakes over a long period of time will take them and their drainage basins up and over what we now consider flood stages.  I doubt you could justify more than about five to ten feet of increased water level in the Great Lakes region, but that's enough to create quite a bit of havoc.</blockquote>

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