Lakes of the World with Google Earth

Coastal Research Library Volume 16 Series Editor Charles W. Finkl Department of Geosciences Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida USA The aim of this book series is to disseminate information to the coastal research community. The Series covers all aspects of coastal research including but not limited to relevant aspects of geological sciences, biology (incl. ecology and coastal marine ecosystems), geomorphology (physical geography), climate, littoral oceanography, coastal hydraulics, environmental (resource) management, engineering, and remote sensing. Policy, coastal law, and relevant issues such as conflict resolution and risk management would also be covered by the Series. The scope of the Series is broad and with a unique cross-disciplinary nature. The Series would tend to focus on topics that are of current interest and which carry some import as opposed to traditional titles that are esoteric and non-controversial. Monographs as well as contributed volumes are welcomed. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/8795 Anja M. Scheffers • Dieter H. Kelletat Lakes of the World with Google Earth Understanding our Environment Anja M. Scheffers Department of Geoscience Southern Cross University Lismore, Australia Dieter H. Kelletat Department of Geography and Education University of Cologne Köln, Germany Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of the figures and tables which have been reproduced from other sources. Anyone who has not been properly credited is requested to contact the publishers, so that due acknowledgment may be made in subsequent editions. ISSN 2211-0577 ISSN 2211-0585 (electronic) Coastal Research Library ISBN 978-3-319-29615-9 ISBN 978-3-319-29617-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-29617-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2016934460 © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Printed on acid-free paper This Springer imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Springer International Publishing AG Switzerland Preface Before we discuss lakes, we will briefly touch upon the general principles of water. Water exists on Earth in different forms: as a liquid, frozen in snow, hail or ice, and as vapour. Water can be found in oceans and lakes, flowing in rivers, as ground water, liquid or frozen in permafrost areas, as glaciers and as sea ice near the surface or far below (age-old), as moisture in the soil, in the biosphere, or as one of the elements in different kinds of rock. The volume of water stored in these various reservoirs, however, is very different (Fig. 1.1). Water is the most valuable resource to our planet. As important as the vast oceans covering approximately 360 Mio km2 are the more than 300 Mio lakes that occur on all continents, a number by far too large to imagine (Downing et al. 2006). The terrestrial environment covers an area around 150 Mio km2 whereby the average statistical size to one of these many lakes (altogether with max. 0.6 % of all water for the continents) is calculated to approximately 0.5 km2, an area of around 700 × 700 m. As 16 of the largest lakes on Earth reach a cumulative size of 1 Mio km2, it becomes clear that more than 99 % of terrestrial lakes are much smaller than their statistical average of 0.5 km2. To form a lake (pond or swamp), a closed depression/basin to store water is needed. These formations can be created by endogenic processes—triggered by forces from Earth’s interior like tectonics or volcanic forces—or from active processes at the surface that in many cases occur close to ocean levels along coastlines of the world. The filling of a basin/depression can be from freshwater (being groundwater, precipitation, snow and ice melting, and river run off), or by salt water (becoming salty by higher rates of evaporation than discharge into the basin), and some salt lakes transform into saltpans (and vice versa). Lakes maybe very old and persist over a wide range of geological epochs and climates, or short lived or seasonal or just appearing for geological moments as days or weeks. Additionally, shallow lakes may develop into swamps, bogs, or other kinds of wetlands. For all kinds of lakes, ponds, or wetlands, however, water is needed. In landscapes enriched with many lakes (e.g. Finland, Alaska, Canada, northern Russia), their distribution and in particular their forms and morphologic patterns are almost impossible to identify from the surface. For this reason we will again (after dealing with coastlines of the world and the forms on continents in two earlier books1) take the aspect through space via satellite imagery (from Google Earth programs) to get impressions on the variety of Earth’s lakes. Lakes as bodies of water (fresh or saline) in natural depressions may be extremely large (like the Caspian Sea covering over 420,000 km2), but also very small and miniscule. These bodies of water, in particular left from former glaciations or occurring in permafrost landscapes of the Arctic, maybe so small (and often shallow) that the term lake may be regarded as an euphemism and “pond” maybe the more correct name for them. However, there is no scientific definition for ponds. Because of their small size, they often are overlooked in studies, and as they number much higher than of lakes and are zones of high ecological significance for 1 Scheffers AM, Scheffers SR, Kelletat DH (2012) The coastlines of the world with Google Earth: understanding our environment. Coastal Research Library, Dordrecht, Springer. Scheffers AM, May SM, Kelletat, DH (2015) Landforms of the world with Google Earth: understanding our environment, Dordrecht, Springer. v vi many organisms (insects, amphibians, migrating birds), ponds derive our interest. Their actual numbers have never been counted and they tend to appear or disappear within a very short time. These bodies of water often show a transition into wetlands as swamps or bogs and/or may dry out periodically or episodically depending on the conditions of climate and rainfall in the catchment, the availability of groundwater, alternatively the pond may freeze to the ground in the cold period of each year. Potentially, as they will occur again as lakes, these features are also included in this book. Special chapters are devoted to saline (or salt) lakes, and—in their evaporated forms—to saltpans. From the many aspects of lake science including water budgets, temperature regimes, mixing types, biology/ecology, and chemistry (to mention a few), we shall concentrate on the genesis of lakes and other closed forms containing water, moisture/swamps, or minerals. The organisation of the book follows different forms of lake origin (often connected to the question of age) such as extra-terrestrial meteor impacts, structural depressions by tectonic activity, patterning of joints or faults, volcanic origin e.g. in craters, or the forming influence of glacier ice, subterranean permafrost, littoral processes, running water (rivers), wind (aeolian dune landscapes or by deflation), and solution of rocks (karst forms). An important aspect to the character of depressions as sedimentary archives identifies former conditions of landscapes including climate change. From this we learn that in former times under different climates, lakes may have existed where today there is an extreme shortage of water (as in deserts) or as giant lakes once dammed by Ice Age glaciers. These and other aspects demonstrate how vast the science of lakes is and a book with only several hundred figures can never adequately cover all of these subjects. More information on the genesis of the world’s coastlines and its terrestrial forms based on satellite images from the Google Earth program are in two previous books. Although on a scientific background, we will use language clear to everyone and in particular use a high number of figures (satellite images and other figures) whereby visual impressions can convey far more information than words. Indeed this is more a picture book than a scientific novel! The text is simply to give framework to the different aspects of lakes concerning their distribution, forms, and forming processes. Only a few from the many thousands of publications are given in a list of references (for further reading not necessarily discussed in the text) for those who are inquiring on more aspects of lakes. The captions present the geographical co-ordinates and an indication to its scale, plus more data if available. As service to our readers, we incorporated a large amount of numerical data and in particular the captions (latitudes, longitudes, length and area of lakes, volume of water, average/max depth and more). The given data is often approximate, as many regions are not investigated in any detail and data is taken from the technical instruments of Google Earth program (or older) and more recent sources and references may offer differing data, explained by errors due to the rapid change of lakes, swamps, and pans. Although it may seem peculiar to write a book on only 0.4 % of the world’s water, there are over 300 million lakes and as the eyes of the continents are extremely diversified: from majestic to miniscule, brilliant clear to muddy, deep to shallow, found high in mountains or near the coast, fashioned by rivers and glaciers, formed by solution of ground rock, be it permafrost decay or even by cosmic impacts. We believe it worthwhile to present this high diversity in the larger number of images, taken mostly from a point high above the Earth’s surface, as from satellites in the Google Earth program. The authors have numerous decades of experience through their fieldwork in all continents on the landscapes and climates of the globe, with a strong connection to the forming processes of water, e.g. along the coastlines of the world. Their expertise is geomorphology and landscape evolution, climate change, the period of the Ice Ages (the Pleistocene epoch of the last 2.4 Mio years), as well as the chronology of evolutionary steps via the analyses of sediments Preface Preface vii and different techniques of numerical dating. The authors hope this short overview on the lakes of the world will encourage the reader to develop their knowledge on continental waters, the most valuable resource for the future of humankind. Mullumbimby, NSW, Australia Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany Anja M. Scheffers Dieter H. Kelletat About Google Earth Virtual, web-based globes such as Google Earth, NASA World Wind, or Microsoft Virtual Earth allow all of us to become travellers visiting the most remote places and tour our planet or even outer space at speeds faster than a rocket. Any computer user can easily, at no charge, download and use Google Earth (for both PC and Mac computers). If you have not done so already, download Google Earth, (the new version) or Google Earth Pro (higher resolution and more features), from earth.google.com, install it on your computer, and prepare yourself to fly around the globe on your own research expedition. You can travel to millions of locations and look for the context of all landscape features of interest to you (geography, geology, vegetation, man-made structures, and more). You can also see these objects from different altitudes (i.e. in different scales), perspectives, and directions; you can view a chosen area around 360° from an imaginary point in the air; and you can fly deep into canyons and craters. You can look straight down in a traditional 2D perspective or enable an oblique view in 3D, you can hover above one location, circle around, or fly like a bird over countries, continents and oceans. In this book we focus on geologic and geographic features, but that is only a snapshot of what Google Earth is providing with their virtual globe. There is no room here for a complete tutorial, but you will find that the program is so easy to use and understand that you will be an expert after working with it for a few minutes. Please visit the Google Earth web page for a complete free Google Earth tutorial that is constantly updated to reflect the improvements in different versions of Google Earth (http://earth.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=enandanswer=176576). We hope that the diversity of the landforms of the world will come alive for you and stimulate your curiosity to become an explorer of these fascinating places either as a hobby or profession. ix Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the support provided by our editors at Springer Publishing, Petra van Steenbergen and Hermine Vloemans. We would personally like to thank them for their consistent cooperation and full support. Dr. Charlie Finkl – thank you for considering this volume for the Coastal Research Library. Very kindest regards to Anne Hager (editing, graphics), Frank Schmidt-Kelletat (graphics) and Stan Kinis (language) for their time, assistance and guidance. Their support was vital to this book. To friends along the way…, thank you for listening and learning together. And finally, to our extended, ever supportive, loving families. We love you all. Mullumbimby, NSW, Australia Mülheim an der Ruhr, Germany October 2015 Anja M. Scheffers Dieter H. Kelletat xi Contents 1 Introduction: General Approach, and a Short Look at the Diversity of Lakes.... 1.1 Examples of Large Continental Lakes .................................................................. 1.2 Different Shape of Lakes: From Simple to Complex ........................................... 1.3 Different Association/Clusters of Lakes ............................................................... 1.4 Colour of Lakes, Ponds and Pans ......................................................................... 1.5 Examples for Ice Age lakes .................................................................................. 1.6 Subglacial Lakes (of Antarctica) .......................................................................... 1.7 Meltwater Ponds on Glaciers ................................................................................ References ..................................................................................................................... 1 3 12 19 20 28 41 42 47 2 Important Pre-requisites for the Existence of Lakes: Basin and Depression Forming Processes ................................................................ 49 2.1 Lake Basins Formed by Endogenic Processes: Tectonics, Structural Control and Volcanism......................................................................... 50 2.1.1 Lake Forms Depending on Tectonics and Structural Control .................. 50 2.1.2 Lakes Formed by Volcanic Processes ...................................................... 57 2.2 Lake Basins and Lakes Formed by Exogenic Processes ...................................... 67 2.2.1 Impact Crater Lakes ................................................................................. 67 2.2.2 Lakes Formed by Karst Processes ........................................................... 79 2.2.3 Lakes Occurring Along the Coastlines of the World ............................... 87 2.2.4 Lakes Formed by Rivers .......................................................................... 98 2.2.5 Lakes Formed by Glaciers and Ice Ages.................................................. 99 References ..................................................................................................................... 145 3 Swamps, Bogs and Other Wetlands .......................................................................... 149 References ..................................................................................................................... 179 4 Saline Lakes and Saltpans ......................................................................................... 4.1 Saline Lakes .......................................................................................................... 4.2 Saltpans and Related Features .............................................................................. References ..................................................................................................................... 181 181 185 241 5 Lakes Adapted to Landscapes and Climate ............................................................. 5.1 Lakes (Perennial, Periodic or Episodic) in Dune Landscapes and Deserts .......... 5.1.1 Ancient and Modern Lakes in Deserts of Africa ..................................... 5.1.2 Lakes, Swamps and Pans in the Great Artesian Basin of Australia ......... 5.2 Lakes and Ponds in Permafrost Environments ..................................................... References ..................................................................................................................... 243 243 243 244 251 286 Epilogue: History and Future of Lakes in Times of Climate Change and Rising World Population .......................................................................................... 289 Index .................................................................................................................................. 291 xiii