Water

July is Lakes Appreciation Month

Thanks to the North American Lakes Management Society (NALMS) July is Lakes Appreciation Month. They started Lakes Appreciation Month to “focus attention on the value of lakes and reservoirs to society and the threats they face.” In the face of climate change and human-caused pollution, focusing on taking care of these precious water resources is more critical than ever. 

Learn More About Aquatic Ecology

Take a dive into these fascinating lake facts:

Did you know lakes can die?

  1. Once formed, lakes do not stay the same. Like people, they go through different life stages—youth, maturity, old age, and death.
  2. All lakes are either open or closed. If water leaves a lake by a river or other outlet, it is open. All freshwater lakes are open. If water only leaves a lake by evaporation, the lake is closed. Closed lakes usually become saline (salty). This is because as the water evaporates, it leaves behind solids—mostly salts.
  3. Like oceans, lakes naturally stratify, forming layers of warmer water above, and cooler water layers below. But too much lake stratification isn't a good thing, limiting mixing, which allows oxygen to reaches below and cooler water temps to reaching the upper layers for reliant aquatic species. Weather like wind and rain, as well as water flow from tributaries that's needed to mitigate lake stratification are being impacted by climate change, leaving lakes' ecosystems high and dry, literally sometimes. 
  4. The Great Salt Lake, in the U.S. state of Utah, is the largest saline lake in North America.
  5. The lowest lake in the world is the Dead Sea, on the edge of Israel and Jordan. The surface level is 418 m below sea level.
  6. The highest lake in the world is the crater lake of Ojos del Salado, on the border of Chile and Argentina at 6,390 m above sea level.
  7. The deepest lake in the world is Lake Baikal in Siberia, Russia, it is 1,637 m at its deepest point.
  8. The longest lake in the world is Lake Tanganyika in Africa at 660 km and it is also the second deepest lake.
  9. The Great Lakes shared by the US and Canada include 5 lakes and contain around 21% of the world's freshwater supply.
  10. Lake Superior is the largest of the Great Lakes and has the largest surface area of any freshwater lake in the world at 82,000 km².
  11. Finland has the nickname ‘Land of the Thousand Lakes’ as there are over 187,000 lakes in the country.

  12. But Canada has Finland beat, with almost 2 million lakes.

     

  13. There are 117 million lakes on Earth, covering 3.7 percent of the continental land surface.
  14. Most lakes are relatively small – 90 million lakes are less than two football fields in size.
  15. Most lakes lie low — 85 percent are at elevations less than 1,600 feet (500 meters) above sea level.
  16. Limnologists are people who study inland waters - lakes, reservoirs, rivers, streams, wetlands, and groundwater.
  17. There are three basic ways that limnologists classify lakes: how many nutrients lakes have, how their water mixes, and what kinds of fish live in them, speaking of fish…
  18. The largest fish found in lakes is the sturgeon, which can grow to 6 meters (20 feet) and weigh more than 680 kilograms (1,500 pounds)!
A laptop and a collection of data loggers next to a lake.

 

Looking to monitor lakes? 

Check out these customers who are using HOBO data loggers to monitor in and around lakes…

Are you monitoring lakes using a HOBO data logger? Email us at social@onsetcomp.com. We’d love to feature your application in an upcoming post.

 

 

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