I am a Senior Research Scientist for the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute and this is one of several pieces made for a project called Wool and Water.

Wool and Water is a data art project that blends fiber art with scientific data to create visual representations of changing water quality conditions in the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain Basin. In association with the 50th anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the Paul Smith’s College Adirondack Watershed Institute has embarked on a collaborative fiber arts project supported by the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership to showcase the legacy of protecting clean water in the Lake Champlain Basin and beyond.

These pieces illustrate the concept of lake stratification and mixing. Northern lakes in climatic regions like the Adirondacks develop pronounced stratification during the summer months as the sun heats surface waters more rapidly than deeper zones and thermal resistance to mixing increases. As this occurs, the top and bottom layers of the lake become isolated and the water column is divided into the epilimnion – the upper layer of uniformly warm circulating and fairly turbulent water, the hypolimnion – the cold, relatively undisturbed region of dense water at the lake bottom, and the metalimnion – the strata between the other two characterized by a steep thermal gradient. In late summer and fall, declining air temperatures and changes in sun angle result in a reduction of heat input to the lake and mixing of layers increases. Eventually, thermal resistance breaks down completely, and the entire volume of water in the lake mixes. This is often referred to as turnover and occurs around October in most Adirondack lakes. Stratification also exists in winter under the ice but is weaker.

The mitts demonstrate thermal stratification on the right hand and show the layers in different colors, with beads that represent the temperature depth profile of the lake. The left hand mitt shows the weaker stratification in the wintertime, with a temperature profile that ranges from approximately 4° at the lake bottom to 0° at the surface ice layer. The hat shows the same thing; it is reversible and can be worn on its thermally stratified summer side, or flipped and worn on its winter side.

Data: temperature profile data for summer from our Upper Saranac Lake Monitoring Platform www.uppersaranacmonitoring.com.

Mitten pattern: https://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/easy-fingerless-...