Floods
Typically a 1.5 m (5 ft) flood occurs every three years, a 4 m (13 ft) flood every decade, and a fill or near fill a few times a century. The water in the lake soon evaporates with a minor or medium flood drying by the end of the following summer.
In strong La Niña years the lake can fill. Since 1885 this has occurred in 1886–1887, 1889–1890, 1916–1917, 1950, 1955, and 1974–1976, with the highest flood of 6 m (20 ft) in 1974. Local rain can also fill Lake Eyre to 3–4 m (10–13 ft) as occurred in 1984 and 1989. Torrential rain in January 2007 took about six weeks to reach the lake but put only a small amount of water into it.
When recently flooded the lake is almost fresh and native fresh water fish, including bony bream (Nematolosa erebi), the Lake Eyre Basin sub-species of golden perch (Macquaria ambigua) and various small hardyhead species (Craterocephalus spp.) can survive in it. The salinity increases as the 450 mm (18 in) salt crust dissolves over a period of six months resulting in a massive fish kill. When over 4 m (13 ft) deep the lake is no more salty than the sea, but salinity increases as the water evaporates, with saturation occurring at about a 500 mm (20 in) depth. The Lake takes on a pink hue when saturated due to the presence of beta-carotene pigment caused by the algae Dunaliella salina.
Read more about this topic: Lake Eyre
Famous quotes containing the word floods:
“When raging love with extreme pain
Most cruelly distrains my heart,
When that my tears, as floods of rain,
Bear witness of my woeful smart;
When sighs have wasted so my breath
That I lie at the point of death,”
—Henry Howard, Earl Of Surrey (1517?–1547)
“And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not act on them will be like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell-and great was its fall!”
—Bible: New Testament, Matthew 7:26-27.
Jesus.
“In early times, before the floods swept across the world, there was life, albeit odd, as one can see from the fossils of mammoth bones, and there was the regime of Prince Metternich.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)