Crater Lake is deep, but where does it rank?
Monday, December 3, 2007 12:42 PM PST
CRATER LAKE NATIONAL PARK, Ore. (AP) — Depending on how you figure it, Crater Lake is the eighth, seventh or third-deepest lake in the world.
Owen Hoffman, a director with the Crater Lake Institute and a former park ranger, says different scenarios based on average depth and other factors can back any of those claims.
Typically, Crater Lake ranks seventh and is the deepest in the nation at 1,949 feet.
Hoffman said Crater Lake could rank eighth in the world with the recent discovery of sub-glacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica, believed to be 2,133 feet deep.
But Vostok is covered by nearly 13,000 feet of ice that appears to be eons old.
By other standards, Hoffman says, Crater Lake could rank third in the world.
Hoffman’s revised ranking is based on determining an average depth. Great Slave Lake in Canada, at 2,014 feet, is the deepest in North America. Great Slave, however, has an average depth of only about 226 feet based on surface area.
Crater Lake, created by eruptions of Mount Mazama 7,700 years ago, has an average depth of 1,148 feet. Based on Hoffman’s research, the deepest lake in the world, Baikal in Russia, has a maximum depth of 5,070 feet and an average depth of 2,350 feet.
The second-deepest lake, Tanganyika, in Africa, has a maximum depth of about 4,550 feet and an average of 1,675 feet.
But after Crater Lake others fall behind.
Thus, Hoffman said, based on its average depth, Crater Lake is in third place if one excludes the subglacial Lake Vostok.
Different scientists sometimes calculate differing depths for lakes.
Based on water volume, Crater Lake falls far behind other challengers because of its compact size. But Hoffman said it is the only one of the lakes in the race managed completely as a national park.
He said Crater Lake has another unusual claim: It is one of two contenders without an incoming or outflowing stream.
The other is Vostok, under more than two miles of Arctic ice.
