21st century lakes

As climate change ripples across the Adirondacks, researchers and activists are worried they don’t know what warming water is doing to fish in the region’s thousands of lakes and ponds.

Now they’re looking to an old problem for a solution.

In the 1980s, acid rain was crippling lakes across the Adirondacks, but nobody was sure how badly.

To figure it out, the state helped launch a massive survey of the damage. The extraordinary effort, unlike any undertaken before or since, sent researchers through forests, across wetlands and up mountains to measure, sample and fish from half of the region’s lakes in just four years.

Between 1984 and 1987 the state-backed Adirondack Lake Survey Corp. visited 1,469 lakes and ponds looking for patterns in the geology, chemistry and life of each lake.

Surveyors found acid rain had emptied the fish from at least 100