How the hell you do lose a lake?

Mike of Vagabondish led me to this astounding newsbit from Reuters:

SANTIAGO (Reuters) – A lake in southern Chile has mysteriously disappeared, prompting speculation the ground has simply opened up and swallowed it whole.

“In March we patrolled the area and everything was normal … we went again in May and to our surprise we found the lake had completely disappeared,” said Juan Jose Romero, regional director of Chile’s National Forestry Corporation CONAF.

Uh-huuuh.

That’s a pretty sizable lake…it dried up completely within 2 months? O_O I’ve seen a dried up lake in Australia, but it’s something that’s bound to happen because of the drought they were experiencing.


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One response to “How the hell you do lose a lake?”

  1. Snoop Hound Avatar
    Snoop Hound

    A 10 to 12 acre lake, 100 feet deep takes 2 months to dry up and it’s not noticed by those Cruise or Sight-seeing boats? Where exactly is this with respect to the South Pacific Ocean and wouldn’t there be a freshwater plume out in the ocean somewhere? I’d like to hear from some technical people. Fresh cold water would be pretty easy to spot in a somewhat warmer salt water body, one would surmise. If it is or was winter down there, then maybe sight-seeing cruises were not there, but fishermen should have been. Could there be a spring, which diverted the water upstream before the lake? It could be the answer, if the spring was diverted. Glacial till is composed of clay, silt and boulders, leaving one to surmise that diversions could happen upstream, as well as at the bottom of the lake. Less water coming in than going out may be the reason, and this situation could have been there all along, before the spring diversion upstream. A rock formation, like a limestone cave, could be upstream and could have collapsed underneath.

    Springs of this sort feed lakes up in Minnesota and Wisconsin coming from Lake Superior. If the springs are diverted by some ground movement or collapse below, those lakes in the upper midwest could suddenly go dry with the same devastation to the economy.

    Hope this helps in some little way. Minor tremors or shifts in the earth’s crust may never affect the ground surface, but one has to be suspect of the way that ground water interacts with surface water. For this reason, drinking wells should be examined in the area for any changes in quantity production.

    Snoop Hound

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