subject: Some Information About Lakes You Never Knew 1 [print this page] A lake is a body of relatively still fresh or salt water of considerable size, localized in a basin, that is surrounded by land. Lakes are inland and not part of the ocean and therefore are distinct from lagoons, and are larger and deeper than ponds. Lakes can be contrasted with rivers or streams, which are usually flowing. However most lakes are fed and drained by rivers and streams.
Natural lakes are generally found in mountainous areas, rift zones, and areas with ongoing glaciations. Other lakes are found in endorheic basins or along the courses of mature rivers. In some parts of the world there are many lakes because of chaotic drainage patterns left over from the last Ice Age. All lakes are temporary over geologic time scales, as they will slowly fill in with sediments or spill out of the basin containing them.
Many lakes are artificial and are constructed for industrial or agricultural use, for hydro-electric power generation or domestic water supply, or for aesthetic or recreational purposes. The word lake comes from Middle English lake ("lake, pond, waterway"), from Old English lacu ("pond, pool, stream"), from Proto-Germanic lako ("pond, ditch, slow moving stream"), from the Proto-Indo-European root leg' ("to leak, drain"). Cognates include Dutch laak ("lake, pond, ditch"), Middle Low German lake ("water pooled in a riverbed, puddle"), German Lache ("pool, puddle"), and Icelandic laekur ("slow flowing stream"). Also related are the English words leak and leach.
There is considerable uncertainty about defining the difference between lakes and ponds, and no current internationally accepted definition of either term across scientific disciplines or political boundaries exists. For example, limnologists have defined lakes as water bodies which are simply a larger version of a pond, which can have wave action on the shoreline or where wind-induced turbulence plays a major role in mixing the water column. None of these definitions completely excludes ponds and all are difficult to measure. For this reason there has been increasing use made of simple size-based definitions to separate ponds and lakes.
One definition of lake is a body of water of 2 hectares (5 acres) or more in area, 331 however others have defined lakes as water bodies of 5 hectares (12 acres) and above, or 8 hectares (20 acres) and above. Charles Elton, one of the founders of ecology, regarded lakes as water bodies of 40 hectares (99 acres) or more. The term lake is also used to describe a feature such as Lake Eyre, which is a dry basin most of the time but may become filled under seasonal conditions of heavy rainfall. In common usage many lakes bear names ending with the word pond, and a lesser number of names ending with lake are in quasi-technical fact, ponds.
