Chemical and physical properties of some saline lakes in Alberta and Saskatchewan

Effect of Salinity on Evaporation from Water Surface in Bench-Scale Testing

Freshwater and hypersaline lakes in arid and semi-arid environments are crucial from agricultural, industrial, and ecological perspectives. The purpose of this paper was to investigate the effect of salinity on evaporation from water surfaces. The main achievement of this research is the successful capture of simulated climate–surface interactions prevalent in the Canadian Prairies using a custom-built bench-scale atmospheric simulator. Test results indicated that the evaporative flux has a large variation during spring (water/brine: 1452/764 10−4 g·s−1·m−2 and 613/230 × 10−4 g·s−1·m−2 night) and summer (1856/1187 × 10−4 g·s−1·m−2 day and 1059/394 × 10−4g·s−1·m−2 night), and small variation in the fall (1591/915 × 10−4 g·s−1·m−2 and 1790/1048 × 10−4 g·s−1·m−2 night). The primary theoretical contribution of this research is that the evaporation rate from distilled water is twice that of saturated brine. The measured data for water correlated well with mathematical estimates; data scatter was evenly distributed and within one standard deviation of the equality line, whereas the brine data mostly plotted above the equality line. The newly developed 2:1 water–brine correlation for evaporation was found to follow the combination equations with the Monteith model best matching the measurements.

Composition, diversity, and stability of microbial assemblages in seasonal lake ice, miquelon lake, central alberta

The most familiar icy environments, seasonal lake and stream ice, have received little microbiological study. Bacteria and Eukarya dominated the microbial assemblage within the seasonal ice of Miquelon Lake, a shallow saline lake in Alberta, Canada. The bacterial assemblages were moderately diverse and did not vary with either ice depth or time. The closest relatives of the bacterial sequences from the ice included Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria, Verrucomicrobia, and Cyanobacteria. The eukaryotic assemblages were less conserved and had very low diversity. Green algae relatives dominated the eukaryotic gene sequences; however, a copepod and cercozoan were also identified, possibly indicating the presence of complete microbial loop. The persistence of a chlorophyll a peak at 25–30 cm below the ice surface, despite ice migration and brine flushing, indicated possible biological activity within the ice. This is the first study of the composition, diversity, and stability of seasonal lake ice.