Over the past 100 years more than 25 million people have visited Oregon's Crater Lake National Park to behold the majestic beauty of what is perhaps the most remarkable lake on earth. At nearly 600 meters deep, Crater Lake is the deepest lake in the U.S. and the seventh deepest in the world.
Figure 1. Crater Lake in Oregon (above) is the second deepest lake in North America and among the continent’s clearest. Made a National Park in 1902, the lake received surprisingly little scientific attention until the early 1980s. In 1978, the author and a colleague observed that the lake’s water clarity had diminished, possibly caused by sewage incursion and associated phytoplankton growth. Intensive study through the 1980s did not conclusively establish the cause of clarity loss, but a suspect sewage disposal facility was finally removed in 1991. Since then, water clarity has improved to historic levels. A NASA Landsat color infrared photograph of southern Oregon Cascade Range (right) (taken October 13, 1976) shows Crater Lake, at center left, approximately 45 kilometers north of Upper Klamath Lake (at the bottom of the photograph).
National Park Service, top; U.S. Geological Survey.
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