Think that all lakes contain water? Think again. There are some truly weird lakes in the world, with strange contents, peculiar animals, unusual formations and odd properties, says Helen Pilcher.
Some are so brightly coloured they make the sixties look beige, whilst others are so enigmatic they are almost impossible to find. From lakes smaller than the average bedroom, to lakes bigger than Kazakhstan, please give a big wet welcome to the world’s weirdest lakes.
Weirdest lakes in the world
Pitch Lake, Trinidad
Pitch Lake in La Brea, southwest Trinidad plays fast and loose with the definition of a lake, because this liquid-containing body, is full of bitumen.
Bitumen is the black, highly viscous liquid, frequently used to coat roads and roofs. It is a complex mix of hydrocarbons that can be manufactured artificially by refining crude oil, orharvested directly from the wild. Containing 10 million tons of the sticky stuff, Pitch Lake is the world’s largest natural deposit of bitumen.
The lake was discovered in 1595 by none other than Sir Walter Raleigh, who used the substance to help waterproof his ship. The lake lies close to a subduction zone, where one tectonic plate is slowly sliding under another. This provides a route for oil, deep underground, to travel to the surface, where the lighter, more volatile components evaporate. This leaves behind the heavier, more viscous bitumen.
Lake Pitch covers around 0.4 square kilometres and is thought to be around 75 metres deep. Remarkably, this seemingly inhospitable lake is actually teeming with microbes that have evolved to feast on its hydrocarbons. Pitch Lake is the closest thing on Earth to the hydrocarbon seas found on Saturn’s moon, Titan. So, it raises the possibility – if there is life in Pitch Lake, maybe there is life on Titan.
Lake Baikal, Russia
If you were accidentally to drop your keys into any of the world’s lakes, try not to drop them in Lake Baikal. The Siberian freshwater body is the deepest lake on earth.
With a maximum depth of 1,620 metres, Lake Baikal is more than 800 times deeper than the deep end of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, around ten times deeper than the English Channel, and twice as deep as the world’s tallest building – the Burj Khalifa – is tall.
The reason for these hidden depths lies in the fact that Lake Baikal is located in a rift valley, where the Earth’s crust is continually being pulled apart. This means that, for as long as tectonic activity continues, the lake will only get deeper.
This is not the only weird thing about this UNESCO World Heritage site, however. Lake Baikal formed around 25 million years ago, so this makes it the oldest lake on earth. Thanks to its age and isolation, there are species found here that exist nowhere else on Earth. This includes the world’s only freshwater seal, called the Baikal seal, and the Baikal oil fish or golomyanka, which is transparent and has no scales.
Lake Benxi, China
Think of lakes and we tend to imagine large, resplendent bodies of water, big enough to fit sailboats and swimmers. Yet, in China, the world’s smallest natural lake is no bigger than the average-sized bedroom.
The crystal clear Lake Benxi, located in the mouth of a cave in the Xihu district of Benxi, is just 15 square metres. With its tapered shape, it is said to look like a wine glass or arhinoceros horn. But hat’s weird, perhaps, is that this tiddler is considered a lake.
So, what makes a lake a lake? Lakes can be freshwater or saltwater, natural or artificial. The water in them, however, needs to be relatively static and surrounded by land. Size and depth are fairly irrelevant, but the way the water is supplied isn’t. Bodies of water fed by a supply that is filtered by caves tend to be classified as lakes. So, Lake Benxi is not, as some might think, a pond with an attitude problem. It really is a lake.
Loch Ness, Scotland
What could be weirder than a lake that contains a mysterious monster that many have seen but no one can verify.
With a surface area of 56 square kilometres, Loch Ness is the largest freshwater loch in the Scottish Highlands, home to Nessie, the much loved lake monster. Some think she is a beast, others that she could be an eel, a log, a fish, a hoax or maybe even, a trick of the light. She is, for certain, shy, expertly dodging the cameras of the hundreds of thousands of tourists that visit the lake each year.
But Loch Ness is mysterious in other ways too. The lake lies on the Great Glen Fault, a line of weakness in the rocks that encase it, which occasionally triggers minor earthquakes. It also never freezes, a quirk that is due to the so-called thermocline effect. When it is cold, surface water becomes colder and denser, and sinks down, causing warmer water from the depths to rise up. This circulatory motion helps to keep the water liquid, which is good news for Nessie, as it makes it easier for her to swim.
The Vanishing Lake, Northern Ireland
One day it’s there. The next it’s gone. Then it’s back again. Loughareema, also known as the “Vanishing Lake” in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, is famous for its dramatically fluctuating water levels.
The transformation, which can happen in hours, is caused by the lake’s unique geology. Three streams flow into the lake, but none flow out. Instead, water drains through sinks at the bottom of the lake, which can become blocked by peat and debris. This causes the lake to fill up. Then when the water reaches a certain level, it all flushes through and the lake rapidly empties.
The Antrim Coast Road, which was built when the lake was empty, passes through the middle of the lake, but is elevated so drivers can pass safely. Do watch out though. Legend tells of a coach and horses that drowned in the lake over a hundred years ago, whilst attempting to cross when full. Now on nights when the lake is full, a ghostly coach is said to haunt the shoreline.
Kolorowe Jeziorka, Poland
Why settle for a single brightly coloured lake, when in Poland, you can have three for the price of one. Kolorowe Jeziorka, aka ‘the colourful little lakes,’ are a series of three artificial lakes on the slopes of Wielka Kopa mountain in the country’s southwest.
Between 1785 and 1925, the mountain was mined for its pyrite. Workers dug deep into the mountainside, and when the mines were abandoned, the craters left behind filled with rainwater. Now, each has its own distinctive hue, caused by the chemical composition of its banks and bottom.
At 730 metres above sea level, the relatively shallow Green Lakelet owes its colour to the presence of copper compounds. One hundred metres downhill, the Azure Lakelet also contains copper ions, but is much deeper, providing a blue tinge. In summer, people swim here. Meanwhile, at 560 metres, the Purple lakelet contains iron compounds and aqueous sulfuric acid, giving it the same pH as grapefruit juice. Needless to say, swimming in this lake is not advised!
Megalake Parathethys, Europe and Asia
It may have dried out over 6 million years ago, but this lake deserves a spot on the weird list, because it was the largest to ever exist.
This wasn’t just a lake. This was a Megalake. It formed around 12 million years ago, when the mountain ranges of what would later become central Europe, rose up and cut off the ancient Paratethys Sea from the rest of the global ocean. This created an isolated body of water that stretched all the way from the eastern Alps to Central Asia.
At its peak, Megalake Paratethys stretched over an area of around 2.8 million square kilometres, and contained more than 1.8 million cubic kilometres of brackish water. This is more than ten times the volume of all the current salt- and freshwater lakes combined, and around one third of the volume of the modern Mediterranean Sea. In its geologically short life, the lake was home to some truly unique animals, including Cetotherium riabinini, the smallest whale known from the fossil record, which grew to just three metres long.
Jellyfish lake, Palau
The name says it all. Jellyfish Lake in Palau is named after the millions of golden jellyfish that are found there and nowhere else.
This lake, on Eil Malk island, is a so-called marine lake because it is connected to the ocean via fissures in the surrounding limestone. It is odd for two reasons. The first is that it the water is permanently segregated into layers, which is unusual for a saltwater lake. An oxygenated top layer, 13 metres deep, is separated from an anoxic bottom layer, 15 metres deep, by a layer of purple bacteria so dense that light cannot pass through.
The jellyfish live in the top layer, where the second odd thing happens. Every day, they migrate horizontally through the water, chasing the sun as it moves through the sky. This enables the symbiotic algae that live inside the jellyfish to get the sunlight they need for photosynthesis. The bacteria make nutrients for the jellies, and in return, they get a free trip round the lake and lovely, safe space to live.
Lake Natron, Tanzania
Some lakes are brightly coloured because of the minerals they contain, others because of their algae. Lake Natron in Tanzania falls into the second camp.
Lake Natron is a hypersaline lake, meaning that it has very high salt concentrations. It also hot – reaching temperatures of 60 oC - and has a high (alkaline) pH, due to the presence of sodium carbonate and other minerals.
These harsh conditions make it tough for regular life, but a breeze for the salt-loving microorganisms that have evolved to live there. This includes certain photosynthetic cyanobacteria which make red pigments called carotenoids. These pigments produce the deep reds of the lake’s open water, as well as the orange colour of its shallows.
Every year, millions of lesser flamingos visit Lake Natron to breed. The birds eat the cyanobacteria, which gives them their characteristic colour. Baby flamingos hatch with grayor white down feathers, which only become pink when they too start to chow down on the pigment-rich cyanobacteria.
Lake Vostok, Antarctica
Although it may seem improbable, the surface of this lake is actually lower than sea level. Lake Vostok in Antarctica is buried under 4,000 metres of ice. The intense pressure created by this, alongside geothermal heat from the Earth’s interior, prevent the freshwater lake from freezing, even though its temperature is a chilly minus 3 degrees Celsius.
- Does Antarctica have any insects? And what's this hostile continent's largest permanent land animal?
- Are there any plants in Antarctica? Discover the flora thriving in the cold, inhospitable wilderness
Located beneath Russia’s Vostok Station, Lake Vostok is one of the largest subglacial lakes in Antarctica. It was sealed off from the surface around 15 million years ago, but weirdly, it still has tides. The surface of the lake rises and falls by around a centimetre, depending on the position of the Sun and the Moon.
Lake Vostok is cold, dark, nutrient poor and pressurised, with unusually high concentrations of nitrogen and oxygen, yet despite this, there could be life. In 2013, scientists detected microbial DNA in water samples taken from the lake. Some of the sequences matched those of known extremophiles, but others were new to science, suggesting the presence of some as yet unknown microbial species. However, critics caution that the data could be artefactual, created by contamination from the icy drill used to reach the lake. So, for now, the jury is out. Only time will tell if there is life in Lake Vostok.
