What's the Science Behind Spooky Lakes? With Geo Rutherford

Let’s wade into limnology and explore some downright eerie quirks of nature in the world’s lakes. Geo: So Spooky Lakes are not about supernatural or ghosts or ghouls. Spooky Lakes is about the natural world, being spooky all by herself. It’s about the way that we interact with the world. So shipwrecks and diving where we go into these strange environments. It's the way that we pollute the world and destroy the world, like toxic situations, mining situations. Some human-made things that haunt the world’s lakes include pollution, invasive species, erosion and even shipwrecks. You can find more than two HUNDRED shipwrecks in just ONE of the Great Lakes! Geo: Lake Superior is incredibly cold and deep. And as a result, anybody who dies in Lake Superior, doesn't come back because their body is not gonna float to the surface. There's a chemical reaction with their skin and the freshwater called saponification. And they kind of become a soap mummy at the bottom of Lake Superior. And they're like preserved for eternity. There’s literally corpses down there that have been down there for 100 years or more In Russia’s Lake Baikal, the oldest and deepest lake in the world, you’ll find the golomyanka. Geo: Lake Baikal is in Siberia. It's completely landlocked… So it's 5,387 feet deep, meaning that it's more than a mile deep And so there's strange creatures. 80% of the animals in Lake Baikal are endemic to that lake. Like you cannot find them anywhere else in the world. There’s the golomyanka, which by itself is the spookiest name ever for a fish. It's this white blind, weird fish that they say if you bring it into the sunlight, it melts in your hand. I can't believe it even exists Tanzania has Lake Natron, named after the type of salt in it. Geo: That natron is the same material that the Egyptians used to mummify corpses. The salty alkaline water mummifies most creatures that fall in. This keeps predators away from one of the only animals tough enough and thick-skinned enough to tolerate this intolerable place: flamingos!
Some lakes are just naturally inhospitable to life.
Like Trinidad’s Pitch Lake. Geo: …which is a lake of asphalt… This naturally occurring mix of gas, water, and minerals formed thousands of years ago. People still swim in it! Then there’s “Toxic Lake” in Romania. Geo: Which is this lake that has been used as a receptacle of mining waste. They filled an entire valley with this toxic mining waste that's acidic and its neon orange and neon green. Uhhh, no one swims in that one. That’s enough limnology, let’s head back ashore. (It’s safer there!)