Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Lonar Crater Lake, Pleistoscene epoch
Mains level: NA
The colour of water in Maharashtra’s Lonar Lake, formed after a meteorite hit the Earth some 50,000 years ago, has changed to glaring.
Make a note of all saltwater lakes in India. Few of them are Pulicat, Pangong Tso, Chilika, and Sambhar Lakes etc.
About Lonar Lake
- Lonar Lake, also known as Lonar crater, is a notified National Geo-heritage Monument, saline (pH of 10.5), Soda Lake, located at Lonar in Buldhana district, Maharashtra.
- It was created by an asteroid collision with earth impact during the Pleistocene Epoch.
- It is one of the four known, hyper-velocity, impact craters in basaltic rock anywhere on Earth.
- It sits inside the Deccan Plateau—a massive plain of volcanic basalt rock created by eruptions some 65 million years ago.
- Its location in this basalt field suggested to some geologists that it was a volcanic crater.
Why there’s a color change?
- The salinity and algae can be responsible for this change.
- There is no oxygen below one meter of the lake’s water surface.
- There is an example of a lake in Iran, where water becomes reddish due to increase in salinity.
- The level of water in the Lonar Lake is currently low as compared to the few past years and there is no rain to pour fresh water in it.
- The low level of water may lead to increased salinity and change in the behaviour of algae because of atmospheric changes.
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