Wednesday, January 14, 2009

ThE Most Unique Lakes of our World

The beauty of lakes has attracted one and all.....

Here are some of the Lakes from around the world that are unique in their own special ways.....

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Plitvice Lakes (Croatia): Sixteen Lakes interconnected by Spectacular Waterfalls

The Plitvice Lakes are a series of sixteen lakes interconnected by spectacular waterfalls, set in a deep woodland and populated by deers, bears, wolves, boars and rare bird species. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, the lakes are renowned for their distinctive colours, ranging from azure to green, grey or blue. The colours change constantly depending on the quantity of minerals or organisms in the water and the angle of sunlight.


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Boiling Lake (Dominica): A Flooded Fumarole

The Boiling Lake is situated in the Morne Trois Pitons National Park, Dominica's World Heritage site. It is a flooded fumarole, or hole in the earth's surface, 10.5 km east of Roseau, Dominica, on the Caribbean. It is filled with bubbling greyish-blue water that is usually enveloped in a cloud of vapor. The lake is approximately 60 m across.


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Red Lagoon (Bolivia): Red (algae) + White (borax)

The Laguna Colorada (Red Lagoon) is a shallow salt lake in the southwest of the altiplano of Bolivia, close to the border with Chile. The lake contains borax islands, whose white color contrasts nicely with the reddish color of its waters, caused by red sediments and pigmentation of some algae.


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Five-Flower Lake (China): Beautiful Multi-Coloured Lake with Fallen Tree Trunks

The Wuhua Hai, or Five-Flower Lake, is the signature of the Jiuzhaigon National Park in China. The lake is a shallow multi-coloured lake whose bottom is littered with fallen tree trunks. The water is so clear that you can see the trunks clearly. The water comes in different shares of turquoise, from yellowish to green, to blue. It is located at an elevation of 2472 meters, below Panda Lake and above the Pearl Shoal Waterfall.

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Dead Sea (Israel and Jordan): Lowest Point on Earth

The Dead Sea is a salt lake situated between Israel and the West bank to the west, and Jordan to the east. It is 420 meters (1,378 ft) below sea level and its shores are the lowest point on the surface of the Earth on dry land. The Dead Sea is 330 m (1,083 ft) deep, the deepest hypersaline lake in the world. It is also the world's second saltiest body of water, after Lake Assal in Djibouti, with 30 percent salinity. It is 8.6 times saltier than the ocean. This salinity makes for a harsh environment where animals cannot flourish and boats cannot sail. The Dead Sea is 67 kilometers (42 mi) long and 18 kilometers (11 mi) wide at its widest point. It lies in the Jordan Rift Valley, and its main tributary is the Jordan River.

The Dead Sea has attracted visitors from around the Mediterranean basin for thousands of years. Biblically, it was a place of refuge for King David. It was one of the world's first health resorts (for Herod the Great), and it has been the supplier of a wide variety of products, from balms for Egyptian mummification to potash for fertilizers.

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Lake Baikal (Russia): Deepest and Oldest Lake in the World

Lake Baikal is located in Southern Siberia in Russia, and it's also known as the "Blue Eye of Siberia". It contains more water than all the North American Great Lakes combined. At 1,637 meters (5,371 ft), Lake Baikal is the deepest lake in the world, and the largest freshwater lake in the world by volume, holding approximately twenty percent of the world's total fresh water. However, Lake Baikal contains less than one third the amount of water as the Caspian Sea which is the largest lake in the world. Lake Baikal was formed in an ancient rift valley and therefore is long and crescent-shaped with a surface area (31,500 km²) slightly less than that of Lake Superior or Lake Victoria. Baikal is home to more than 1,700 species of plants and animals, two thirds of which can be found nowhere else in the world and was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1996. At more than 25 million years old, it is the oldest lake in the world

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Lake Titicaca (Bolivia and Peru): World's Highest Navigable Lake

Lake Titicaca is a lake located on the border of Bolivia and Peru. It sits 3,812 m (12,500 ft) above sea level making it the highest commercially navigable lake in the world. By volume of water it is also the largest lake in South America. Lake Titicaca is fed by rainfall and meltwater from glaciers on the sierras that abut the Altiplano.

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