I know a lake is bigger, but what is the cutoff? I have heard that a lake must either be 100 feet deep at some point, or must be over a mile across at the widest point. Are either of these true? Both? Or is it some other definition?
According to wikipedia there is no standard definition. There are definitions based not only on size but also depth and wave action.
There are certainly regional variations. Where I grew up in southern Ontario some of what we called a pond would be a lake where I live now in southern Alberta. The majority of surface water in prairie Alberta is made up of shallow sloughs full of mud, leaches and ‘ditch itch’, anything decent enough to swim in (and many not) is called a lake.
Not to hijack this post, but is there any difference between a pond and a lagoon? I tend to think they are the same, but we have a retention pond in our development and nobody calls it a lagoon. OTOH, parks have lagoons. Is that the difference?
Ponds dry up in hot dry weather. They get stagnant, scummy on top and smelly.
Lake levels drop in dry weather. I can’t recall them getting stagnant like pond water does.
There’s a nice pond in a golf course and park near my job. I often go there to eat my lunch. Watch the ducks swimming and sometimes people fishing. Typically by August the water is getting stagnant and the city puts up “Warning do not fish signs”. The ducks disappear too. I guess they don’t want to swim in that water either. The pound gets back to normal water levels during the winter.
I think, properly speaking, a lagoon is a body of water formed when some small (and usually relatively shallow) part of a larger body of water is cut off by a relatively small land barrier from the larger body. Typically, lagoons are formed by the sea (and, as in the case of coral atolls, need not even be fully cut off from the sea as a whole) but perhaps it is also correct to call a similar body of water cut off from a lake a lagoon. Very likely, though, the word is often used incorrectly just to make ponds sound more exotic.
In Newfoundland, virtually every interior body of water that has been named is officially known as a pond. Only a few exceptionally large lakes are exceptions, on an island that has tens of thousands of ponds. Herea re three of them with names shown:
In the Dakotas, the Alberta-like ponds are called “pothole lakes”, no matter how small.
One common definition, though it’s not a hard and fast rule by any means:
Ponds are generally spring or seepage fed, and have no inlets or outlets. Lakes have streams which fill them and streams which drain them. The waters of a lake should end up in one of the oceans as a result.
There is (or was 50 years ago) a body of water in Douglas Park in Chicago which we called a lagoon. It was isolated from any other waters and probably was man-made.
Minnesota counts lakes that are larger than ten acres in size - some of them are pretty swampy and shallow. There are almost 12,000 of them by that measurement.
Experts on lakes are called limnologists. They describe this phenomenon as epilimnion and hypolimnion. The top area is the epilimnion. The cold water below it, which may not warm up much during the summer if the lake is at all deep, is the hypolimnion.
It’s named after the lake, upon whose shores it lies, clearly visible when crossing on I-10… Several miles from the much larger and more conspicuous Calsasieu Lake.
