Green Lake (New York)
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| Green Lake | |
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| Location | Onondaga County, New York |
| Lake type | meromictic |
| Basin countries | United States |
| Surface area | 150 acres |
| Max depth | 192 ft |
Green Lake is the larger of the two lakes in Green Lakes State Park just east of Syracuse in Onondaga County, New York; Round Lake is the smaller one. Both are meromictic lakes, which means that there is no seasonal mixing of surface and bottom waters. Meromictic lakes have been extensively studied, in part because their sediments can preserve an historical record extending back thousands of years. Green Lake was the first lake in North America identified as meromictic,[1] and is perhaps the single most extensively studied mermomictic lake in the world; it is usually called "Fayetteville Green Lake" in the scientific literature.[2]
Green Lake is a particularly stable meromictic lake; corings of its bottom sediments have been used to construct a timeline extending back thousands of years. Seasonal mixing and oxygenation of its waters is restricted to the upper 18 meters of its depth. The lake is 52 meters deep; the water deeper than the upper layer has very little oxygen. Just below the top layer of water there is a very dense layer of purple sulfur bacteria, which are unusual in that their photosynthesis involves sulfur compounds and in their inability to thrive in oxygenated water. The reason for Green Lake's meromictic character is the influx of calcium and sulfate ions to its bottom layer from the rocks in which the lake is embedded.[2]
The color of the lake is not, in fact, green. Interesting features in the lake are "marl reefs", reef-like formations along the shoreline, consisting of bacteria-bound marl.
[edit] References
- ^ Eggleton, Frank E. (1956). "Limnology of a Meromictic, Interglacial, Plunge-Basin Lake," Transactions of the American Microscopical Society, Vol. 75, No. 3. (Jul., 1956), pp. 334-378.
- ^ a b Hilfinger, Martin F., Mullins, Henry T., Burnett, Adam, and Kirby, Matthew E. (2001). "A 2500 year sediment record from Fayetteville Green Lake, New York: evidence for anthropogenic impacts and historic isotope shift," Journal of Paleolimnology, Vol. 26, pp. 293-305.
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