Portal:Lakes
The Lakes Portal
A portal dedicated to Lakes
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Introduction
A lake is often a naturally occurring, relatively large and fixed body of water on or near the Earth's surface. It is localized in a basin or interconnected basins surrounded by dry land. Lakes lie completely on land and are separate from the ocean, although they may be connected with the ocean by outflowing rivers. Lakes, like other bodies of water, are part of the water cycle, the processes by which water moves around the Earth. Most lakes are fresh water and account for almost all the world's surface freshwater, but some are salt lakes with salinities even higher than that of seawater. Lakes vary significantly in surface area and volume of water, but in total cover approximately 2.5 × 106 km2 (less than 2%) of the Earth's surface.
Lakes are typically larger and deeper than ponds, which are also water-filled basins on land, although there are no official definitions or scientific criteria distinguishing the two. Lakes are also distinct from lagoons, which are generally shallow tidal pools dammed by sandbars or other material at coastal regions of oceans or large lakes. Most lakes are fed by springs, precipitation, and surface runoff, and both fed and drained by creeks, and rivers, but some lakes are endorheic without any outflow, while volcanic lakes are filled by precipitation and runoff and do not have any inflow streams.
Natural lakes are generally found in mountainous areas (i.e. alpine lakes), dormant volcanic craters, rift zones and areas with ongoing glaciation. Other lakes are found in depressed landforms or along the courses of mature rivers, where a river channel has widened over a basin formed by eroded floodplains and wetlands. Some lakes are found in caverns underground. Some parts of the world have many lakes formed by the chaotic drainage patterns left over from the last ice age. On a geologic time scale, all lakes have a finite lifetime, as they will eventually fill in with sediments or spill out of the basin containing them. (Full article...)
Selected article -
Lake Onega (/oʊ.ˈnɛ.ɡə/; also known as Onego; Russian: Оне́жское о́зеро, romanized: Onezhskoe ozero, IPA: [ɐˈnʲɛʂskəɪ ˈozʲɪrə]; Finnish: Ääninen, Äänisjärvi; Livvi: Oniegujärvi; Veps: Änine, Änižjärv) is a lake in northwestern Russia, on the territory of the Republic of Karelia, Leningrad Oblast and Vologda Oblast. It belongs to the basin of the Baltic Sea, and is the second-largest lake in Europe after Lake Ladoga, slightly smaller than Lebanon. The lake is fed by about 50 rivers and is drained by the Svir.
There are about 1,650 islands on the lake. They include Kizhi, which hosts a historical complex of 89 Orthodox churches and other wooden structures of the 15th–20th centuries. The complex includes a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Kizhi Pogost. The eastern shores of the lake contain about 1,200 petroglyphs (rock engravings) dated to the 4th–2nd millennia BC, which have also been inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The major cities on the lake are Petrozavodsk, Kondopoga and Medvezhyegorsk. (Full article...)
General topics
| Lake zones |
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| Lake stratification |
| Lake types |
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General images -
The following are images from various Lake-related articles on Wikipedia.
Round Tangle Lake, one of the Tangle Lakes, 2,864 feet (873 m) above sea level in interior Alaska (from Lake)
The Nowitna River in Alaska. Two oxbow lakes – a short one at the bottom of the picture and a longer, more curved one at the middle-right. (from Lake)
Garibaldi Lake in British Columbia, Canada, is impounded by lava flows comprising The Barrier (from Volcanogenic lake)
Cross sectional diagram of limnological lake zones (left) and algal community types (right) (from Lake)
An artist's depiction of the subglacial lakes and rivers beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Image credit: Zina Deretsky / US National Science Foundation (from Subglacial lake)
Soda Lakes in Nevada, USA (from Volcanogenic lake)
An illustration of ice core drilling above subglacial Lake Vostok. These drilling efforts collected re-frozen lake water that has been analyzed to understand the lake's chemistry. Image credit: Nicolle Rager-Fuller / US National Science Foundation (from Subglacial lake)
Lusatian Lake District, Germany, Europe's largest artificial lake district. (from Lake)
Ice melting on Lake Balaton in Hungary (from Lake)
Lake Trasimeno, Italy, has volcanic origin (from Lake)
The first view of the sediment at the bottom of subglacial Lake Whillans, captured by the WISSARD expedition. Image credit: NASA/JPL, California Institute of Technology (from Subglacial lake)
Crater Lake in Oregon, USA (from Volcanogenic lake)
A view of the southern polar plain of Mars. The area where a subglacial lake has been detected is highlighted. Image credit: USGS Astrogeology Science Center, Arizona State University (from Subglacial lake)
A schematic cross-section of the subglacial pool beneath Taylor Glacier and its outflow, Blood Falls. Image credit: Zina Deretsky / US National Science Foundation (from Subglacial lake)
Lake Mapourika, New Zealand (from Lake)
Titan's north polar hydrocarbon seas and lakes, as seen in a false-color Cassini synthetic aperture radar mosaic (from Lake)
Russian scientist Peter Kropotkin first proposed the idea of fresh water under Antarctic ice. (from Subglacial lake)
View of a bay in Lake Toba, on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, which is the largest volcanic lake in the world (from Volcanogenic lake)
Lava lake at Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (from Volcanogenic lake)
Ephemeral 'Lake Badwater', a lake only noted after heavy winter and spring rainfall, Badwater Basin, Death Valley National Park, 9 February 2005. Landsat 5 satellite photo (from Lake)
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Lakes on the Altiplano | |
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| Present-day lakes and salt pans | |
| Lake expansions of Lake Titicaca | |
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| Lakes | |
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| Notable freshwater lakes |
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| Mid-altitude lakes | |
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"The Largest Lake in the Philippines" | |||||||
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Lakes in Mongolia | |
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Lakes of New Mexico | |
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Lakes and other natural bodies of water in New South Wales, Australia | |
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Lakes of Switzerland | ||
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External media
- World Lake Database. International Lake Environment Committee Foundation. – provides a searchable database
- Global Lakes and Wetlands Database. World Wide Fund for Nature. – available for free download
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