We took several vacations when I was a youth to the Crater Lake area (we stayed at nearby and far-less-interesting Diamond Lake). I always found the idea of the crater — a caldera, actually, a volcano that blew its top and collapsed — to be fascinating, along with all the volcanic geology surrounding it — vast expanses of pumice, etc. and so forth.
Crater Lake is ancient. The freshwater
lake began to form nearly 7,700 years ago when the volcano, Mount Mazama, at a former elevation of 12,000 feet, violently erupted and collapsed on itself with enough force to incinerate parts of Oregon and spewing ash as far as Vancouver and Kansas. The event exerted 46 times more force than that of San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake.
The lake, itself, is also interesting, being a closed ecosystem with lots of unique goodies, very deep, and all that. So this article about some deep underwater probing of Crater Lake’s secrets was pretty spiffy to read.
Researchers here are going deep into the giant volcanic hole with aquatic robots and highly sensitive sonar. The lake, formed by a massive eruption 7,700 years ago, is one of the world’s purest bodies of fresh water and, at 1,932 feet, one of its deepest. Most interesting to scientists, it’s had little mixing with the outside world–no feeder creeks, no rivers, just snowmelt and rainwater.
“This is a simple system we’re just beginning to understand,” said Irja Galvan, a professor of biology at Oregon State University, who was here Tuesday visiting friends who are studying Crater Lake.
Scientists from Oregon State and the U.S. Geological Survey were conducting field studies this week on the lake’s ecology. The project included lifting a submersible robot down onto the lake by helicopter and sending it deep into the water to collect digital video, data and moss samples. The scientists plan to compare the samples and data to
research from the late 1980s, when the scientists first described moss beds at the bottom.Part of the researchers’ goal here is to assess how much moss is contained in the lake, how old it is and then add up all the carbon to understand the ecosystem of the lake. Because there are so few nutrients in the lake as a whole, the moss colonies are rare homes to life such as tiny worms and crustaceans, which are fish food to only two breeds of fish that live in the lake–kokanee salmon and rainbow trout. As many as 40 other kinds of fish introduced to the lake over hundreds of years have died off.