Centuries-old American lake stump remains a mystery to scientists
Crater Lake, a crater lake in Oregon in the northwestern United States, is the deepest lake in the country. However, the lake, which gave the name to the national park of the same name, attracts the attention of scientists and tourists not only due to its depth, which reaches 597 m, and the purest water of a mesmerizing blue hue.
An unusual old stump, it is not clear when it ended up in the ninth deepest lake in the world, has been afloat for more than a century and has attracted the attention of scientists and tourists.
Ranger standing on a tree stump. 1930s.
The first description of a log sticking out of the water was made back in 1896 by Joseph Diller.
According to his records, the floating log had a whitish hue, its width was 60 cm, and above the surface of the water was about 130 cm, and the log was stable enough to support the weight of a person. At the same time, through the clear water, Diller saw that the log had remnants of roots, which made Diller mistakenly think that the stump was holding onto the bottom.
On the second visit to the lake, the researcher found the stump floating in a completely different place, 400 m from the first. For the next century, scientists continued to find out why the log, nicknamed the Old Man of the Lake, floats not in the usual horizontal, but in an upright position, as it turned out in the lake and how old it is.
It is known that the 10-meter log was once the trunk of the Canadian hemlock
Promotional video:
- an evergreen coniferous tree native to North America. There is a hypothesis that the tree fell into the water of the crater lake along with a landslide, but the vertical position of the log is the most controversial. According to one of the versions, initially a heavy stone remained in the roots of the tree, which made the log stick out of the water. Over time, the lower part of the log absorbed water, became heavier, and the stump remained floating in this position without roots.
In favor of the version with stones at the roots is the case with the eruption of Mount St. Helens in the northwestern United States in the spring of 1980. Then, after a landslide, hundreds of trees were floating vertically near the surface of Spirit Lake. However, they all ended in the same way: at first they had a large root structure, swam for several years, and then went to the bottom.
Why the Old Lake remains intact for more than a century, does not go to the bottom and keeps upright, remains a mystery.
The ability of the log to move quickly along the surface of the lake also attracts attention. Despite the large mass and low windage, on a windy day, the stump is able to move up to 7 km per day!
In 1938, scientists conducted a three-month experiment to track the movement of a log across a lake. It turned out that the stump is able to move further and faster than scientists had assumed:
One of the observations of the movement of the stump, made at the beginning of the 20th century.
from July 1 to September 30, he covered a distance of more than 100 km.
“In July, August and the first half of September, the log floats almost exclusively in the northern part of the lake. This definitely indicates that southerly winds prevail at this time of year, which are deflected by the crater walls, creating eddies and causing the log to float back and forth,”said naturalists Wayne Kartchner and John Derr.
However, according to the staff of the national park, the log does not always follow the direction of the wind. “You would think that 1.2 m above the surface should act like a sail. However, sometimes it moves against the wind on the lake,”said Mark Buktenica, a local ecologist, in a CBS report on the strange tree stump.
The only thing that has been able to learn about the stump precisely thanks to modern scientific methods is its age. According to Scott Girdner, a local biologist, radiocarbon analysis showed
that the wood of the log is at least 450 years old.
Therefore, given that the Crater Lake itself was only discovered in the middle of the 19th century, it remains to be wondered how many years the mysterious stump actually floats in it.
Perhaps the safety of the stump is due to the crystal clear water of the lake, in which there are almost no fish. Of the six fish species introduced in 1881-1941, only two have taken root here - rainbow trout and sockeye salmon.
In addition, at a depth of 120 m, there is a free-floating plant - fontinalis moss. And the only place near the surface where it occurs is the submerged part of the stump. This may indicate that the stump once floated in the water column, scientists say.
For the park's workers, the Old Man Lake is not just a stump that has been floating near the lake's surface for decades. “It has character, history and is part of the park,” says Girdner. It is believed that the stump is the keeper and forecaster of the weather, and once he showed his character.
In 1988, scientists conducted an underwater study of the lake and, for safety reasons, anchored the "old man" to the tip of Wizard Island. According to eyewitnesses, at the same hour the sky was covered with clouds, a strong storm arose, which ended only when the stump broke off the anchor and continued to float freely on the lake.
Pavel Kotlyar