The Lost Room Beneath Lake Superior That a Geologist Said Was 100,000 Years Too Old

In the fall of 1984 a salvage diver named Ray Voelker went down into a round depression in the bed of Lake Superior, six miles west of Eagle River on the Keweenaw Peninsula, looking for a tow raft that had slipped into it in 1947. At ninety-one feet, past a restriction so narrow he had to push his tank ahead of him, he found a chamber. And standing upright out of the silt at the far end of it was a wall of dressed limestone, five level courses, the joints so tight his dive knife would not seat between them. A glacial geologist from Michigan Technological University dived the site the next morning and wrote the same thing in her field notes: tight coursing, a worn channel along the top course, no mortar in the joints. She recorded one detail he had not — a hammered metal plate on a low bench behind the wall. Her notebook for that week is missing three pages; the stubs are still in the binding. She never published, left the university in 1990, and the site was fenced and grated in 1993. The post-glacial lake stages are real and measurable. So is the strongest objection to all of this — isostatic rebound tilting the whole basin — and it is given here at full weight rather than dismissed. Who do you think the elder was remembering when he said the one who closed a place was not always the one who opened it? Leave your answer in the comments.