Lakes come in many forms, some more stable than others, but it is usually surprising when they just vanish.
For example, in March 2007, the approximately five-acre lake in Bernardo O'Higgins National Park, about 1250 miles south of Santiago, was its normal size, but after two months or so it was gone. There was, by late May, just a 100-foot-deep crater, a few chunks of ice, and a trickle of what had once been a river flowing out of the lake. This surprised the park rangers in that protected area of the Magallanes region of Patagonia in Chile, including Juan Jose Romero of CONAF (Corporación Nacional Forestal — the National Forestry Corporation). Geologists and others were deployed to investigate.
Had seismic activity opened up the ground and drained the water away? A quake in neighboring Aysen may well have caused the fissure – but there were no earthquakes reported in the lake's immediate area. The landscape had long been active, though. Andres Rivera, a glacier expert hailing from the University of Chile, talked to the newspaper Tercera about the lake's not having been in existence thirty years before and about the Magallanes area having "seen interesting changes in the last few decades." Thousands of earth tremors had recently afflicted Southern Chile.
Other things were changing as well. Rivera elsewhere released photos of the shrinking glaciers of the Southern Patagonia Icefield. Even the supply of ice had altered.
Chile was not the only place, though, to have a lake disappear. Inhabitants of the village of Bolotnikovo, 155 miles east of Moscow in central Russia, were puzzled in 2005 by a body of water that vanished between one day and the next. Local fisherman were the first to notice, on May 19, 2005. The NTV channel soon telecast images of the large muddy and debris-strewn basin that remained. The onscreen correspondent compared it to a drained bathtub.
Officials in the Nizhny Novgorod region opined that the Vachsky District's Beloye Lake had likely been sucked into a cave or an underground river. Dmitry Zaitsev, a fireman, noted that trees seemed to have been pulled down along with the water. He was concerned whether people had been sucked under too.
Theories abounded for the diaster. One older resident hypothesized the involvement of the United States in the situation. Another, a tractor driver, believed that extraterrestrials robbed the water from the lake — and was not the only one who thought this. Some villagers had spotted a reddish light that emanated from the area of the former lake.
Soon, the Ministry of Emergency Management sent a team of flood experts and geologists to find out for certain, and, on June 16, 2005, they reported that the water was now 100 meters undergound. Pavel Ivanov, a geologist, described the structure underneath the lake as being "like a Swiss-cheese."
Alexander Kluyev, another official, spoke of houses being swallowed up some seven decades before. The lake, which was 300 meters from the village, had a long history of frightening the locals. Young people in the village claimed the mysterious lake had come into being during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. There was even a rumor about an Eastern Orthodox church hidden underwater — because of the wrath of God.
Melt water briefly refilled the lake during Spring, but was only temporary.
In July 2006 the lake reappeared, to the point that water could be seen both in the crater and a short distance from it. Sand and clay had apparently stopped up the hole or holes in the soluble rock layers.
Less unnerving than the sinister rumors surrounding the fate of Lake Beloye was the case of a 23-acre lake that disappeared during early June 2004 in Wildwood, Missouri. Lake Chesterfield vanished, and well-off homeowners were concerned about whether their property values had been affected.
Shannon & Wilson Inc. finished drilling work on July 8 of that year to locate where the water had drained, and find out about the condition of the lake's dam. The latter was judged to be okay, but the drainage was not at that time figured out.
Heavy rains had enlarged the lake before the dissolving and cracking of the underlying limestone caused the manmade lake to be unmade. The resultant sinkhole emptied the lake.
The costs of fixing the lake — about $1,000 per household — were approved by the residents. But their expenses were not a one-time thing.
In early September 2005 it was reported that the lake had vanished a second time.
These disappearances in many parts of the world point to the impermanence of things — especially where geology is concerned.
— Douglas Chapman
CNN.com (via Associated Press), http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/06/21/missing.lake.ap/index.html, 6/21/07
BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6225676.stm, 6/21/07
Yahoo! News, http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070620/sc_nm/chile_lake_dc, 6/20/07
Canoe Network — CNEWS, http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2007/06/20/4277360-ap.html, 6/20/07
Wildlife Conservation Society, http://www.wcs.org/international/latinamerica/southerncone/ohiggins
"South American Glaciers Melting Faster, Changing Sea Level," News Release, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2003/138.cfm, 10/16/03
BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4566355.stm, 5/20/05
Pravda, http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/02-07-2006/82804-lake-0, 7/2/06
Pravda, http://english.pravda.ru/accidents/21/97/385/15506_lake.html, 5/20/05
Free Republic postings (translated from Chosun Ilbo, 6/17/05), http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1424629/posts
My Online Neighborhood, Our Wildwood.com, http://ourwildwood.com/html/main/announce_display/newsID/3007367/index.html, 7/23/04
The Examiner — Eastern Jackson County, Missouri, Online, http://examiner.net/stories/090605/new_090605009.shtml, 9/6/05
MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5191079/, 6/11/04