Walker Lake in Nevada

Walker Lake in Nevada Today’s Image of the Day comes thanks to the NASA Earth Observatory and features a look at the beautiful Lake.

The Lake is a remnant of the glacial Lake Lahontan, which dried up after the climate warmed and dried out following the last Ice Age.

The lake measures roughly 13 miles from north to south and 6 miles east to west. It gets its water from the Walker River, which flows down from the north.

Walker Lake is a natural lake, in the Great Basin in western Nevada in the United States. It is 11 mi (17 km) long and 5 mi (8 km) wide, in northwestern Mineral County along the east side of the Wassuk Range, about 75 mi (120 km) southeast of Reno. The lake is fed from the north by the Walker River and has no natural outlet except absorption and evaporation. The community of Walker Lake, Nevada, is found along the southwest shore.

The lakebed is a remnant of prehistoric Lake Lahontan that covered much of northwestern Nevada during the ice age. Although the ancient history of Walker Lake has been extensively studied by researchers seeking to establish a climatic timeline for the region as part of the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository study, this research has raised many puzzling questions. Unlike Pyramid Lake, the lake itself has dried up several times since the end of the Pleistocene, probably due to natural diversions of the Walker River into the Carson Sink approximately 2,100 years ago. Also, this research found no evidence that the Walker Lake basin contained water during the Lake Lahontan highstand, although based on the surface elevation of the highstand evidenced elsewhere in the region it must have.

This photo was taken by an astronaut on board the International Space Station.

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By Rory Arnold, Earth.com Staff Writer

Source: NASA Earth Observatory