Study: Lake-bottom sink increases risk of water outflow

The bigger funnel-shaped area at the Dianchi Lake bottom has sunk by 60 cent meters over the past four years and the risk of water leakage was thus increased, according to a recent report on Yunnan University website.

Dianchi, the largest lake on southwest China’s Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau, exhibits two abnormal funnel-like features in the deepest part of the lake.

The report said the discovery was made by the university’s research team led by Zhang Hucai, and their study has been published online by the international journal Catena, with the title of “Potential catastrophic water outflow from Lake Dian, China: Possible hydrological and ecological risks.”

Catena publishes papers describing original field and laboratory investigations and reviews on geoecology and landscape evolution with emphasis on interdisciplinary aspects of soil science, hydrology and geomorphology.

The study is based on surveys and observations from October 2015 and September 2019. In the study, the researchers speculated that water leakage should have been the cause of Dianchi Lake’s drying up in 1764 AD.

“If catastrophic water outflow occurs again, a maximum of 14.05 × 108 m3 of polluted water would not only contaminate the upper reaches of the large river and/or the lake itself, but would also endanger regional water security and induce widespread negative ecological impacts,” said the abstract of the study.

Online sources; Trans-editing by Wang Shixue