5 Major Lakes Disappearing At Alarming Rate
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Our lakes are disappearing along with our water, and one is dependent on the other. The world’s climate is warming, despite the naysayers who base their scientific conclusions on mythological beings, doomsday myths, and political agendas.
Lakes across the world have shrunk or disappeared completely, and the reasons are legion but climate change tops the list along with sinkholes, and human water use. In the Smithsonian, Sarah Zielinski tells their stories and here are just a few:
- It’s called the Dead Sea, but it’s technically a lake, and it’s been around for millennia. Thanks to water diverted to businesses and homes, however, the balance between water entering and evaporating from the lake has been thrown off. Now, it’s getting shallower, at a rate of about a meter yearly—though officials are working on the problem.
- Lake Waiau was seen by native Hawaiians as a sacred spot. Just 10 feet deep at its deepest, it started disappearing in 2010, and as of September, it was just a pond, less than a foot deep. The reason for the phenomenon, which US officials call “unprecedented in modern times,” isn’t known for certain; drought is among the possibilities.
- Florida’s Scott Lake was the victim of a 2006 sinkhole; it was gone within two weeks, and it took some 32 tons of wildlife with it. The lake is slowly returning as clay and silt fill the sinkhole, but whether it will be back for good is an open question.
- Last year saw Chile’s Lake Cachet 2, in the Andes, disappear in a night. The culprit here was climate change, which has caused the glacial lake’s frequent disappearance and return. The Colonia glacier holds Lake Cachet 2 in place; when melting thins the glacier, a tunnel allows the water to escape.
- Lake Chad, which is found in Cameroon, Chad, Niger, and Nigeria, used to be the sixth-biggest lake in the world. Not anymore: Some 90% of its area is gone, thanks to a combination of familiar reasons—drought, human use, and climate change among them. That’s caused a “local lack of water, crop failures, livestock deaths, collapsed fisheries, soil salinity, and increasing poverty throughout the region,” the UN says. Images atDiscover magazine show the changing lake.
Click for Zielinski’s full list.
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Some god will cry tears of impotent rage soon and s/he will get to filling up the lakes with water from the heavens because surely s/he won’t let the people down. It’s either that, or I can wash my cars and right after it will start raining, no really that happened this week. If you have rain where you are, you can thank me for washing my cars and having the rain pour down this week. Don’t worry, but just in case start building an ark or something 😉
Thanks for washing your cars Jess, because we got snow, which is just cold rain, kind of 🙂
Yer welcome. Husband said it was me too and gave me a little dance recital to thank me. Seriously, he did this little end zone dance thing, bowing down to the greatness of me like a smartass. I think he was more pleased I cleaned the inside of the cars out and got my shoes out of there, that’s just me though.
Here, we seem to have a reliable supply of ground water. This is not true in all of Brazil. Still, being mostly rain forest, it may never be as desperate as other places, such as the USA.
It could be why Brazil maintains a standing military. The country may have to fight to defend its water.