I know what you’re thinking–how strange can a lake be? A lake’s a lake, right?

In this case, the lake I’m thinking of seems not just strange, but deadly.

The lake I’ve been reading about directly caused the death of a lot of people. They didn’t drown, and it wasn’t due to something obvious (like a dam bursting, or an earthquake), but was something intrinsic to the lake itself.

A generic lake, quiet, serene, and probably not very dangerous lake.

It’s not a poisonous lake (that is, you can go swimming in it without any harm coming to you), and it’s not a boiling lake, like this one in Yellowstone National Park. Falling into this is a bad idea.

On the other hand, a boiling lake WILL kill you either with temperature or poisons. But this isn’t what we’re searching for this week.

That’s not what we’re searching for this week. Instead, we want to find…

1. Can you find a lake somewhere in the world that caused the death of nearly 2000 people? How could such a thing happen? (Hint: This happened within the past 100 years, so it’s relatively recently.)

2. Was a large wave of water associated with this bizarre lake event? If so, how high did the wave go, and what kind of damage did it cause? (If any.)

3. Given this kind of watery disaster, how high would the water go up into the sky from the event?

As always, be sure to tell us HOW you found the answer. (Extra points for finding high-quality, reliable sources. Presentations from 6th graders, as wonderful as they might be, are not a substitute for highly credible sources.)

Search on!