Chicago’s Mysterious Bubbling Creek
Posted by Sean on March 31st, 2009
Bubbly Creek looks placid enough in the photo above, but its shallow depths hold a gruesome secret. This small section of the Chicago River was named Bubbly Creek because of the bubbling gas coming off the riverbed below that has been present for the last hundred years.
So what makes the creek bubble? Rotting blood.
The Union Stockyards earned Chicago the nickname “hog butcher for the world” and made the Windy City the center of the American Meat Industry from 1865 to the 1920s. At the time Bubbly Creek was an open sewer for the stockyards. And what gets discarded when you’re slaughtering thousands of pigs? Tons of blood and entrails. So much that the creek started bubbling hydrogen sulfide and methane from the ongoing decomposition below.
Image of the Union Stockyards with row upon row of pig pens
You’d think that the creek would have stopped bubbling when the Stockyards closed in 1971, or at least wouldn’t still be bubbling more than thirty years later, but the creek bubbles on. Masses of blood worms still gorge on the six feet of rotting blood that makes up the floor of the creek. During the 90s, the blood worms were the only animal able to survive in the oxygen depleted creek, but now thanks to efforts to oxygenate the creek, fish are able to frolic with the blood worms as well.
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March 31st, 2009 at 6:02 pm
So THAT'S what my day needed… The introduction of the phrase “rotting blood.”
Great find!
April 11th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
We were very impressed with Shawn @ the CFI Congress this weekend! What an enthusiastic guy! But I disturbed about this Chicago River thing, as we are regular visitors to Chicago. Just where is this Bubbly place? Exactly, I mean.
April 12th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
http://www.communitywalk.com/labor_trail/map/52…
The above link is a map to bubbly creek on the South Fork of the Chicago River's South Branch.
Snap a photo for me if you go.
-Sean.
April 13th, 2009 at 1:40 am
http://www.communitywalk.com/labor_trail/map/52…
The above link is a map to bubbly creek on the South Fork of the Chicago River's South Branch.
Snap a photo for me if you go.
-Sean.