Loago — Lake Types, Depths and Areas | loago.online
Lakes are grouped by the mechanism that formed their basin, and each mechanism leaves a characteristic shape and depth profile.
Tectonic lakes occupy basins formed by movement of the Earth's crust. The Caspian Sea, the Sea of Aral and the Central African Rift lakes are tectonic basins. Lake Baikal sits in a rift valley and is the deepest lake in the world, with its bottom at 1,637 metres — a depth that only crustal rifting produces.
Glacial lakes fill hollows scoured by retreating ice sheets, or basins dammed by moraines. This mechanism explains why most lakes lie in the Northern Hemisphere at higher latitudes, where past ice sheets left the densest concentration of basins.
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Volcanic lakes fill craters or calderas, or sit behind lava dams. Their basins are typically regular in outline and can be very deep relative to their surface area.
Oxbow lakes form when a river meander is cut off from the main channel. The basin keeps the curve of the original bend and is generally shallow, in contrast to the deep basins of tectonic and volcanic origin.
The formation type also predicts what a lake's water column will do. Most lakes are freshwater and mix through the year; the meromictic condition, where layers do not intermix, is the exception rather than the rule.
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