A Sea Change for Superior: The Warming of the World’s Largest Lake

Synopsis

John Shepard (Producer, Writer, Offline Editor), and Tracy Fredin (Executive Producer) in attendance! Q&A to follow the film screening!

The frigid waters of Lake Superior are notorious for not giving up their dead, and for preserving the hundreds of shipwrecks that have succumbed to the oceanic waves of the world’s largest lake. Yet in 2023 a group of intrepid marathon swimmers set a new relay distance record—swimming without wetsuits—46 miles along the lake’s rugged North Shore in waters that never dipped below a balmy 60-degrees Fahrenheit.

A Sea Change for Superior: The Warming of the World’s Largest Lake documents this 24-hour challenge as part of an investigation of what it means that the world’s largest lake, which holds ten percent of the world’s surface fresh water and 84 percent of the U.S. freshwater reserves, is now among the fastest warming lakes on the planet. The film reveals how this fact, and the impacts of our changing climate that are driving this trend, has profound implications for the lake’s wildlife and natural systems, for tribal and other communities who live along its shores, and for those whose livelihoods depend on Superior’s historically clear, clean, and cold waters.

In documenting these stories, A Sea Change for Superior portends the impacts of climate change on earth’s finite freshwater resources.