Lake Erie consists of three distinct regions: the western, central, and eastern basins. But despite its size, the multispectral HawkEye sensor will provide ocean color data and imagery of gulfs, bays, fjords, estuaries, and other shallow coastal areas with eight times the resolution of SeaWiFS. Weighing just 5 pounds, the toaster-sized satellite is considerably smaller than previous satellite missions that have measured ocean color, such as NASA’s SeaWiFS mission. The image above was captured by the HawkEye sensor on the SeaHawk CubeSat on November 8, 2020. They are distributed widely throughout the lake, but the western part around Toledo, the Erie Islands, and Cleveland is particularly dense with known wrecks. According to an Ohio Sea Grant project that documents many of the lake’s shipwrecks, 277 wrecks have been discovered so far. “In fact, we think Lake Erie has a greater density of shipwrecks than virtually anywhere else in the world-even the Bermuda triangle.”īecause of incomplete record keeping, nobody knows the exact number of shipwrecks that have occurred in Lake Erie, but estimates range from 500 to 2000.

Other common causes of foundering here included collisions and fires. “Storms and waves are probably the number one reason ships sank in Lake Erie,” said Magee, the co-founder of a Cleveland-based group of underwater explorers (CLUE) that search for Lake Erie shipwrecks. “The shallowness of the lake actually makes the waves worse.” Then, within minutes, groups of huge vertical waves can be smashing down on you separated by intervals of just a few seconds,” said Kevin Magee, an engineer at NASA’s Glenn Research Center. “You can have water that is as calm as a pond one moment. Those characteristics are shared by the lake. The name was likely a reference to the fickle, unpredictable, and sometimes violent behavior of the eastern cougar. The name Lake Erie is believed to have originated as a shortened version of erielhonan-a word meaning “long-tailed cat” in the language of the Iroquois tribe that once lived along the lake’s southern shores.

Ship graveyard