(soft music) - I'm Mike Cape, I'm an instructor of the Geosciences in the Physical Science Department at Milwaukee Area Technical College.

And today we're standing on the shore of one of our greatest and most unique natural resources that being Lake Michigan (soft music) Lake Michigan is the second largest of the great lakes.

The great lakes themselves contain over 20% of the world's total fresh surface water.

(soft music) Reaching depths of almost a thousand feet and having an area of over 22,000 square miles.

At any given time Lake Michigan can contain over 1100 cubic Miles of fresh water.

Like in gallons that's like 1.3 quadrillion gallons of fresh water.

(soft music) The Lake hasn't always been here since the beginning of geologic time.

In fact, it's really actually pretty young geologically speaking.

It's really the remnant of continental glaciation from during the Pleistocene Epoch, when a continental glacier, thousands of feet thick scoured the landscape and as it retreated somewhere around 10,000 to 14,000 years ago, it left behind what we know today as Lake Michigan.

(soft music) In terms of a resource, okay?

And how valuable it is to us as a resource.

The thing that naturally comes to mind is it has a tremendous amount of value as a water supply.

So population centers up and down it's shoreline from either Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, we all rely on it for a drinking and industrial water supply source.

Waukee Water Works draws somewhere around 375 million gallons of water out of Lake Michigan every day for our use, for either drinking or industrial, or a little bit of agricultural use as well.

(soft music) The World health organization estimates that about 1 billion of the 7.7 on earth, don't have adequate access to safe drinking water.

And we have this right in our backyard.

So it's immeasurable in that regard.

So we need to take care of Lake Michigan because it is so unique, and so many people around the globe wish they had this in their backyard just as we do.

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