Haunted Hydrology (SPOOKY LAKES) with Geo Rutherford

Mudbank bones. River wrecks. Salty seas. Pink ponds. Poison dust devils. Steamy streams.. It’s Haunted Hydrology with your favorite Spooky Lakes ambassador, the artist and author Geo Rutherford who is widely known as Geodesaurus. Geo covers the dark history of The Great Lakes, a stump that controls the weather, the what and why of a good lagoon, the field excursions she’s been on for research, the lakes she wants to see the most, and how a drought can shiver your spine. It’s a Spooktober spectacular, folks. It’s Haunted Hydrology.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alie Ward?

  Oh, hey, if you're listening to this, and it seems like you are, a quick announcement that I'll be doing my first ever live show on Monday, November 17th, in Brooklyn, New York, at the Bell House. Patrons, I have sent you a pre-sale code. So if you haven't joined Patreon, it costs $1, but tickets are available there with a code, but they'll go on sale to the general public in a few days, Thursday, October 9th. Again, the show is November 17th in Brooklyn. Okay, link is in the show notes. Let's have the episode. How's your ponytail looking? Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today

• 0:44Alie Ward?

  at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This episode is sponsored by Seed. Bloating, irregular bowel movement, gas. When your gut is off, it gets your attention. Seed's DS1 is a three-time award-winning probiotic, clinically shown to improve regularity, reduce bloating, and alleviate gas so you can move and eat more freely. Take better care of your gut with Seed. Get 25% off with code

• 1:27Alie Ward?

  25OLOGIES at seed.com/ologies. These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. We have to say that. Ugh, trips are full of unexpected discoveries. Maybe you see a sea slug, or you find out that your friend still sleeps with a stuffed animal. But when it comes to your vacation rental, there should not be any surprises. When you book a Verbo vacation rental, if what you expect isn't what you get, Verbo Care has you covered. If something's broken or just not right, Verbo will work to make it right. Plus, you get 24/7 live human support with every booking. Grab your stuffy, we're going on vacay. So book today on the Verbo app. If you know, you're Verbo. Terms apply. See verbo.com/trust for details.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Um, yes, hello.

• 2:14Alie Ward?

  It's the podcast host using the greeting of her guest. And this is Ologies. I'm Ally Ward. And either you are shaking and crying right now about who we're about to talk to, or you are here for curiosity's sake. You don't even know what a deep dive into haunted waters you're about to take. It's great. My guest today is one that y'all have begged for, for five years in a row. There are TikTok rivets, 2 million people, many of whom gather specifically for a month of Spooktober, haunted hydrology, or spooky lakes and rivers and ponds and oceans and seas and sometimes dams and fountains, anything that is a threat to your life and involves liquid, they'll cover.

• 2:54Alie Ward?

  And they do so with a boatload of facts, some deep research, creepy visuals, and a very smooth voice. We love them. Ologites love them so much that you tag us in each other's social media. And this is the year we made it happen, for Spooktober. They're also a brilliantly talented artist and illustrator, and last year came out with the very gorgeous and informative and creepy book, Spooky Lakes: 25 Strange and Mysterious Lakes That Dot Our Planet. And there's a companion coloring book. Just get it. Get them both. Wonderful, beautiful. The book is linked in the show notes. I own it. I love it. 10 out of 10 spookies. And we will get to the episode in a moment, but first, thank you to patrons at patreon.com/ologies who support the show for a hot dollar a month or more.

• 3:38Alie Ward?

  It also allows you to send in questions for the guests before we record, even audio questions, so you might hear your voice on the show. Also, got you the pre-sale ticket code, and we could not do the show without you. If you need classroom-safe, kid-friendly episodes, we have them. They are called Smologies, S-M-O-L-O-G-I-E-S, and you can subscribe to them wherever you get podcasts or in their own feed. And also, Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com in case you need a sweatshirt for the chilly weather. Thank you also to folks who leave us reviews because they help the show so much, and I read them all, as for example, this one that was just left by WolfGirl7200, who wrote, "Thank you for reminding me that I love our planet and want to fight for it. The saliogenology and ethnoecology episodes have literally changed my life this year."

• 4:23Alie Ward?

  Wolf Girl 7200, the howls in appreciation back at you for the review. And we will link those two episodes in the show notes for others who need their lives changed. Okay, on to haunted hydrology. This guest will enlighten you in the dark history of the Great Lakes, the salty seas, the dredged rivers, the chunky Siberian seals, poison dust devils, boiling rivers, pink ponds, and how a drought can shiver your spine. So let's escape to tales of spooky lakes with illustrator, science communicator, author, artist, and expert in the good soup of haunted hydrology, Geo Rutherford.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  I go by Geo Rutherford, even though technically my name is Georgina, because my mom is a geologist with a bad sense of humor. But I've always gone by Gio. And so Geo Rutherford, and I use she/her pronouns.

• 5:33Alie Ward?

  Cool. And your mom is, I saw in your book, your mom's Sandra, right? A science mom?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, she has a PhD in geology. And so, yeah, I very much grew up with earth science in every facet of my life.

• 5:48Alie Ward?

  Well, you're also in the Midwest. So you've got tons of lakes out there, yeah?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, technically, I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, where I think we only really had reservoirs. I moved then later to Wisconsin. But Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, all those states that just have so many lakes.

• 6:05Alie Ward?

  What's the difference between a reservoir and a lake?

• 6:07Speaker 02

  A reservoir is a man-made, created body of water. So it's like a dam put on a river, which then creates this, like, they always look like spiny bushes from the space where they're just like these. And I love them. Like Lake Powell and Lake Mead are some of my favorite lakes. They're just so weird looking from space and in person. And so, yeah, a reservoir is just a man-made lake.

• 6:30Alie Ward?

  I didn't realize that. And I didn't realize until your book that a pond is just a very small lake and it's kind of just up to whomever, right?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, there's no formal, like, universal definition for a pond. I think that if you wanted to clarify, then if sunlight reaches the bottom, and it's like really shallow, but that you could state that about the Great Salt Lake, because the Great Salt Lake is like very shallow. I think it's like maximum 20 feet, maybe three feet average. Yeah, it's like this crazy shallow lake. And so you could argue that it could be a pond by that definition. But then the second kind of qualifier is that it's usually pretty small. And so it's like a small body of water where the sunlight reaches the bottom is usually kind of more considered a pond. But there's tons of ponds across the United States that have lake names, and there's tons of lakes that have pond names. And so it just, it doesn't end up really mattering at all.

• 7:23Alie Ward?

  What about the ones that are seas, like the Dead Sea, salty?

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Yep, and the Sultan Sea. The largest lake in the world is the Caspian Sea, which is a sea. And that's because the definition of a lake is a body of water surrounded by land. So technically, as long as it's not connected to the ocean, then it's a lake. But you have salty lakes as a result of no outlet for the water. It's called an endorheic basin. And that means that the water only escapes via evaporation. And because of that, it ends up being salty. So the Sultan Sea, the Great Salt Lake, the Dead Sea, the Caspian Sea, these are all bodies of water that have no outlet for their water, and it can only escape via evaporation. It's all dried up out there.

• 8:06Alie Ward?

  Do salty lakes, do those just keep evaporating until they're a big mud flat for Burning Man? Like, do those just become saltier and saltier and then they're bye bye?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Yep, yeah, so like, the future of the Great Salt Lake and the Sultan Sea is kind of to end up being these crusty salt flats. So I just visited Lake Manley, which is the lake in the belly of Death Valley. During the glaciers, when all the glaciers were here covering North America, there was a ton of these prehistoric lakes. I don't know why they're called prehistoric lakes, because they don't predate history, but whatever. There was all these giant lakes, and a lot of them disappeared. And what we have left is these giant salt flats. Yeah, most lakes in the world die because of evaporation or like drought, but also rivers are carrying sediment which gets dropped into these lake bodies. Even our Great Lakes here, like Michigan, like Superior,

• 9:00Speaker 02

  they have rivers bring sediment in that end up filling them in. And over time, you end up losing your valley or your lake bed. And you end up with like a bog or a fen or one of these different types of wetlands.

• 9:13Alie Ward?

  Is a bog a lake that's been kind of filled in?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  There is a clarification between the difference between these different types of wetlands. But in a lot of cases, a bog is created from like a body of water that has kind of transformed or evolved into its next phase of life. Like if you talk about like the life and death of a lake, you know, how it begins and how it ends, a lot of times it ends up as this like boggy wetland.

• 9:39Alie Ward?

  And yes, we need a bogology episode, but a quick rundown. According to the article, bogs and fens, what's the difference for Pete's sake? Via greatecology.com. The primary driver that distinguishes a bog from an alkaline fen is that bogs form above the water table from precipitation, but fens are fed mostly through this mineral-rich ground or surface water. Now, if you've heard of a bog body or a mummified corpse, well, yes, that is a thing and it's due to the cold and really acidic water of a bog, which can preserve and then tan the skin. Now, if you're ever in Dublin, there is a natural history museum there that has bog bodies on display. And it's actually a very reverent kind of somber affair.

• 10:22Alie Ward?

  I went there in March and I spoke with the docent. As the museum was closing, we kind of snuck in right before and then popped out. And she told me that as she locks the door behind her every night, she bids good night to the bog bodies and wishes them a restful slumber. So haunted hydrology, it's history, it's chemistry, it's ecology, it's biology, it's geology. And of course, it's geo. But I should also note that I'm sitting here asking you a million lake questions and you are by profession trained as an artist.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've gotten really lucky to be able to combine all these interests that I have into what I do now. I'm, I feel so blessed, but I was, did my undergrad in printmaking and fibers. And then I spent five years being a high school teacher. But then I decided to go to grad school and I went to grad school for printmaking again. And while I was doing that at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, it was the first time that I had ever lived like within seven blocks of a Great Lake. But I started to just go to Lake Michigan every day. For 90 days, I went to Bradford Beach, which if you don't know, if you're not from Milwaukee, it's like kind of a nasty little beach, but I love it. And I didn't know what I was doing there at first. I started to just collect things that I found.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  There's a lot of like plastic and interesting like artifacts that end up on the shoreline, which kind of tell you a story about what's going on with the Great Lakes. So like invasive mussel shells, rusty crayfish claws, things where you're like, oh, you're starting to put together a story of what's happening. And I started to do tons of research into the Great Lakes. So I read Dan Egan's book, which is The Death and Life of the Great Lakes. And then I wrote like a 75 page paper about the Great Lakes and, and all the things I had learned. And then the pandemic hit. And I was in the middle of my last year in grad school and I, I started a TikTok account that my first video I ever posted kind of went viral because of the work that I was doing. By annual report canned with fluid inside of a mason jar.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  But the main question is still, is this a book? Clearly the object inside the jar is a book, but it's now become part of the jar and the contents as artifact. The book has lost its

• 12:33Alie Ward?

  So this post racked up hundreds of thousands of views very quickly. And partly Gio told me because people got mad that this art book by her definition wasn't a real book. And so they fought it out in the comments.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how you go viral on the internet is just make everybody really mad. And I used that to kind of end up making Great Lakes videos. And that kind of ended up somersaulting into me making videos about lakes of the world. And then the first spooky lake month video was in October of 2020. And they're really messy videos because they were like back when you only had a minute.

• 13:06Alie Ward?

  Gio says that she was very experimental and had planned on being a high school teacher again, but then scrapped that and has been sailing the beautiful and sometimes stormy TikTok waters.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Which is essentially like strange lakes of the world wave. Any body of water, actually, any water, anything that's wet, that's morbid. Ally, it's so, I'm such a, I'm crazy about spooky lake month because I should do some of those videos ahead of time or like prep them. Even download some pictures. That would be helpful, Gio. Like, do that, please. Like, that would be so helpful if you would just download a couple of images or like, write your scripts ahead of time, but I don't. I wake up every morning, roll out of bed, I'm drinking coffee, and I'm figuring out what I'm gonna do for that day.

• 13:51Alie Ward?

  I love that glimpse into behind the scenes, cuz I, I'm like, you must be working all year. Like, a week to, no. That's, I mean, same, same with Ologies. Like, our episodes should publish by midnight, 11:57 sometimes. You know what I mean?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Well, it's, there's something about it where like, I work my best under pressure, and like, knowing that people are waiting for a 7:00 PM post Central Time, that like, that works for me. And I post bad videos sometimes where I'm like, wow, that was awful. Last year, I made a video about the Chicago River. I hated that video. I thought it was so terrible. I like, there were so many weird things that I discovered while I was like, researching. There's a submarine that was found in the bottom of the Chicago River, and I was like, that's weird. It had a corpse and a dog corpse in it. A human corpse and a dog corpse. And I was like, how did this end up happening?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  To this day, no one knows who the skeletal remains belong to, or how a submarine ended up at the bottom of a Chicago River. Three out of 10 spookies.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  And I ended up literally down this rabbit hole. Like, all these weird things happened in the early 1900s, where like, people were jumping off the Niagara Falls in barrels, and there was a guy who rode a giant leather bubble across Lake Michigan. And like, all of these things were weirdly connected to this submarine at the bottom of Lake, the Chicago River. And so I was like, taking all of these things and trying to combine them together into a topic, and it was a mess. And yet, that video still did really well. And I was like, guys, no. Bad, bad. This is a bad video.

• 15:30Alie Ward?

  Are you a person who is afraid of lakes in general?

• 15:35Speaker 02

  Hmm. That's kind of interesting. I had a life and death experience in a river.

• 15:39Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Where it was like a flooded river and I, my dog jumped into a waterfall that was overflowing. So it's like a hardcore waterfall and didn't come back out again. And I jumped in after this dog at like 18, I was 18 years old. And to this day, I don't know how I survived. I don't know how my dog survived either because I, like you were immediately have no sense of, of what's up and what's down and where you are and what's going on. And you can't get out because you're being like sucked back in. And I swear, the only reason I survived that was because I'm six foot two. And for some reason I was able to reach the top of the waterfall where the water was like pounding into my face.

• 16:21Speaker 02

  And my feet were touching the bottom. So I was able to shuffle across. And while I was doing that, I reached out and my dog's paw like just ended up in my hand. It was crazy. I still don't know how that happened. And I feel like that to me, I think about that a lot when I'm making these videos. Cause a lot of these videos are, you know, about lakes, but also about just anything that like water is so such killer. Like water is a killer and I find it really fascinating. And there are topics that are too much, that are too scary and I don't cover them, even though people ask for them.

• 16:57Alie Ward?

  Yeah. I think you thread that needle really well where it's also educational. Where I'm like, I wouldn't know that like a low dam could kill me. Like I wouldn't know that or you don't know that aerated water is impossible to get out. Think about people who have not gone into bodies of water because of your videos.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  The one video I was thinking of when I said that was I did a video about the uranium tailing ponds in the Navajo Nation. It's like this crazy story about the uranium that is still to this day poisoning the water of people in the Navajo Nation.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  In fact, thousands of abandoned uranium mines and radioactive tailing ponds still plague the western United States.

• 17:38Alie Ward?

  And for more on mining on tribal lands in the southwest, we happen to have a great pedology episode with Dr. Lydia Jennings, and it's on soil, and it's a topic that matters we don't hear much about, which is why Gio's work, these three-minute videos, reaching a huge audience of millions, is so impactful and also addictive.

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Because sometimes I like to do topics about contemporary issues that are like sick, and like, like the oil fields in Texas, which are like creating these giant pools of toxic water. And like, those are fascinating, and they're really terrible. And so an opportunity to talk about it, like, I can't turn it down. It's just so interesting. And I think we need to know about it.

• 18:15Alie Ward?

  When it comes to kind of the creepiness factor of bodies of water, and I'm sure people talk to you about this a lot, do you feel like there's something innate where if you can't see below a certain depth, or if you like rub up on a stick or something, what makes some bodies of water creepy to you, now that you have gone literally like in-depth?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. Actually, I think it comes back to the fact that I believe that every lake has the potential to be spooky.

• 18:45Alie Ward?

  Okay.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  You don't know what's beneath the surface. Like, there could be somebody who disappeared years and years ago, and they're just there at the bottom of the lake. Like, you'll never know. You don't know if that stick that you think you brushed across is just someone's hand. Every lake gets to have a chance on the starlight of like, being a spooky lake.

• 19:04Alie Ward?

  Do you ever see, like, the Reddit board, like, submecha-phobia? Submecha-phobia?

• 19:08Speaker 02

  I actually go through that for inspiration.

• 19:10Alie Ward?

  Submerged vehicles, submerged anything, like, freaks me out.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:20Alie Ward?

  So if you share my goosebumpy dread at the sight of a sunken boat, or car, or a shopping cart, or whatever, please note that there is a word for that: submechanophobia. Also, please enjoy our maritime archaeology episode with Chanel Sapparopoulos, who I love. And that episode talks about all kinds of shipwrecks and submerged machines all over the world. Now Gio has also traveled all over in her quest to bring you haunted hydrology reports. And just like a mommy blogger's perfect Instagram, they can be picturesque on the surface, but mask unknown horrors. Lake Tahoe.

• 19:55Alie Ward?

  Do you know what's going on in there?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  I just visited Lake Tahoe a couple of weeks ago. I went on a Spooky Lakes road trip. So Lake Tahoe is interesting to me. Some of the basic facts about Lake Tahoe is it's one of the oldest lakes in the United States. It's like over 2 million years old. And it's the second deepest lake in the United States. So it's deeper than Lake Superior, but it's a little less deep than Lake Crater Lake.

• 20:16Alie Ward?

  Lake Superior, 1,333 feet or 406 meters at its deepest point. Lake Tahoe, 1,645 feet or 500 meters. And Crater Lake in Oregon is over 1,900 feet deep or nearly 600 meters, which is about as deep as the tallest radio towers that you might see. Or like two Eiffel Towers stacked on top of each other deep. And we're going to chat about Russia's Lake Baikal in a bit, but it's over 5,000 feet deep or over 1,600 meters, which is about twice as tall as the tallest building in the world, which is the 163-story Burj Khalifa in Dubai.

• 20:59Alie Ward?

  But back to Lake Tahoe, which straddles the lines of Northern California and Nevada near Reno.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  And so it's one of the deepest lakes. And what's interesting about it is that it has kind of a similar history to Lake Superior and these cold freshwater lakes, which don't give up their dead. People who die in a cold freshwater lake and sink to the bottom, they are potentially never going to be seen again, but their bodies are preserved in perpetuity.

• 21:29Alie Ward?

  Well, almost.

• 21:31Speaker 02

  There is a diver there who disappeared in the early 2000s or like maybe the late 1990s. And his body reappeared 20 years later. Somebody discovered his body and it was almost in perfect condition. It was still the way it was 20 years ago. So there's something that happens at the bottom of these cold freshwater lakes. It's called saponification, where the cold freshwater minerals in the water interact with human skin. And there's a chemical reaction called saponification, which creates a substance called adipocere, which is like a waxy substance. And so a human body in a cold freshwater lake essentially becomes just a giant bar of soap. And that crust of soap on your body just keeps you preserved and you just stay

• 22:15Speaker 02

  kind of intact, which is really spooky. Lake Tahoe is like one of those lakes that'll hold on to you forever. And divers have disappeared there. There's been shipwrecks there, which we still have not discovered. We don't know where they are. And Lake Tahoe can have a really crazy shift of weather where there can be like a huge storm on Lake Tahoe, which can take down ships and take down people. And so, yeah, Lake Tahoe is definitely qualifies as a spooky lake. Unfortunately, it is a little too beautiful when you're there in person. You're like, wow. And I went swimming there. It's just so beautiful.

• 22:47Alie Ward?

  But then I guess you could think of it as, um, as a temptress in that way, perhaps.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:53Alie Ward?

  Like a siren of the land. You don't know what's down there when you're looking at a lake and you got yourself a spooky lake.

• 23:00Alie Ward?

  Stinky lakes. Let's talk about the Salton Sea.

• 23:03Speaker 02

  Ooh, I also visited the Salton Sea. That was actually the one I was most excited about because I knew, I knew it would be spooky. And it, it lived up. It was very spooky and like, it was so hot the day that we went there in August. I don't know what we were thinking, but it added somehow to the spookiness, like the sun, just like this like beating down. And I was so sweaty and exhausted. Ugh, even thinking about it, man, I'm getting hot.

• 23:28Alie Ward?

  Has the Salton Sea been the stinkiest lake you've ever been to?

• 23:31Speaker 02

  Ooh, the Salton Sea smells like dead fish and like rot. It smells like mud. It smells, it just smells terrible. And like in the heat, it feels like the heat is just like cooking it, making it like extra stinky. I love the Salton Sea. It's so weird. Everybody should go there.

• 23:47Alie Ward?

  So the Salton Sea is a result of a big water oopsie. When in 1905, a deluge from a spring flood breached these canal walls and flooded a dry lake bed for years, turning it into a big wet lake bed. And as the waters evaporated over time, got saltier and saltier. But in its heydays, like in the 1950s and 60s, the Salton Sea, just a few hours from Hollywood, was this bustling getaway with vacation homes and resorts and shops and nightclubs along this strip called Bombay Beach, which is where Frank Sinatra would croon. And decades later, the water evaporated along with the tourism and the money, leaving behind skeletons of a lot of fish on the lake bed

• 24:32Alie Ward?

  and a bunch of rusted out trailers where there once were resorts. And just it's like rise and fall as a recreation area for like Angelinos needing an escape. And it is truly.

• 24:44Alie Ward?

  One of the worst places I have ever been. I remember my mom, my mom had the stomach flu when we went there once. Poor woman, Fancy Nancy in the back of the van, already retching. And then we roll up to the Salton Sea for a family reunion. She did not deserve that. She didn't deserve it. Not at all.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Salton Sea is such an anomaly. You know, first of all, why'd they call it a sea? It was like the early 1900s. You ought to know that. And it wouldn't have even been salty right away. Like, it would have been a freshwater lake for years before the salts kind of built up because of the evaporation, because it evaporates so much. I think that it's hard to appreciate how huge the Salton Sea is. I flew over it on my way home, which was so satisfying because it's just enormous. And when you're there, because it's so flat, it's in this Imperial Valley. You can't see, you can't see how far it goes. It like truly, it's one of the biggest bodies of water in the United States. So we created it by diverting the Colorado River, where then it flowed into the Imperial Valley for, I think it was like four years.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  It was like years of water flowing into the Imperial Valley. But then that eventually got cut off. And now it's just this body of water that's like slowly evaporating and disappearing. So there's all these like dried out and completely abandoned kind of beach towns along the edge. But the bad thing about that and the reason that the Salton Sea, Great Salt Lake are spooky in their death is because when they die and become these dry salt pans, it's not going to be like Lake Manley, which is this perfectly preserved like salty crust. Instead, it's a salty crust with toxins and arsenic and heavy metals. And a lot of nitrate and things that we pump into our farmlands

• 26:31Speaker 02

  ends up in the Salton Sea and then ends up in that dry basin. And that Ends up picking up in the wind and then getting into everybody's lungs. And so people are breathing in these like agricultural toxins. And that's how you get these huge cancer rates that spike in the Sultan Sea, the Great Salt Lake, the RLC, which is out in Kazakhstan. They're like years ahead of what we're seeing happen at the Sultan Sea. Because the RLC was almost completely drained for agricultural purposes. And now it's just this like toxic wasteland of dust. And while we were there at the Sultan Sea, we saw so many dust devils because it's like this dry basin. And so there's all these giant dust devils that are like flying around.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  And I was sitting there thinking, man, I am here like, just like all these people who live here, just kind of breathing in this like fine silty dust that's a result of the drying of the Sultan Sea. So that's kind of what makes it spooky to me.

• 27:30Alie Ward?

  And it's not just the Sultan Sea. In the 2024 paper Harmful Dust From Drying Lakes, preserving Great Salt Lake water levels decreases ambient dust and racial disparities in population exposure. It lays it all out for Utah, stating that "The drying of lakes with no outlets, called terminal lakes or inland seas, is a major ecological catastrophe of the 21st century. And these lake beds are drying in part due to decreased inflows of water because of climate change and also due to increasing human demands for water. And the study found that two major benefits of stabilizing those water levels for the Great Salt Lake would be to decrease that airborne dust

• 28:12Alie Ward?

  and reduce racial disparities in population exposures to dust. So halting the lake from drying up would protect human and ecological health while promoting environmental justice. And for more on environmental justice, we have a Critical Ecology episode, which we're going to link in the show notes. But on other continents, the 2025 paper Toxic Dust Emission From Drought-Exposed Lake Beds: A New Air Pollution Threat From Dried Lakes. Researchers in China found that a large number of lakes worldwide are shrinking rapidly due to climate change and human activities and pollutants accumulated in these lake bed sediments. Are released into the atmosphere as dust aerosols. The study found that Poyang Lake and Dongting Lake, the largest lakes in East China,

• 28:56Alie Ward?

  experienced these record breaking droughts with up to 99% of the areas exposed to air. And the team found that the dust generated from the lake beds exceeded the regional thresholds of carcinogenic risk and make it worse as climate change progresses. So toxic water evaporates, it leaves the toxins to become toxic dust in the wind, hastening our own return to being dust in the wind. I mean, dust devils do seem like ghosts. And then you also have a particulate matter that could one day slowly painfully kill you.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:30Alie Ward?

  Also fish particles in there.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  So many dead fish.

• 29:34Alie Ward?

  So many dead fish.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, salty and then a lack of oxygen because it doesn't have any kind of introduction of like fresh water or anything.

• 29:42Alie Ward?

  Uh, just the stink puddle is what that is.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:46Alie Ward?

  Can I ask you some questions from people who are excited that you're coming on?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:50Alie Ward?

  Wonderful. Okay, cool. Do you think I would just do the Salton Sea dirty like that? Just leave that? Of course not. So the Salton Sea was once called Lake Cohia after the indigenous folks from the area who lived off the aquatic mollusks and the fish and the plants on the lake. And as it stands, the Salton Sea is home to some stocked fish like tilapia and something called a gulf croaker. But scientists report that 97% of the fish are gone due to algal blooms from fertilizer runoff and just general toxic chemicals and rising salinity. One native species, though, can deal with the salinity and pollution of the Salton Sea, and that is the desert pupfish, which is the crust punk of ichthyology.

• 30:36Alie Ward?

  Also, over 400 bird species hang out or use the area as kind of a migration truck stop. But because we have shit talked this disaster made human induced ecological nightmare, we'll be donating to the Salton Sea Action Committee, which is committed to the rehabilitation of the Salton Sea for the benefit and health of the environment, economy, and people of Southern California. And in G O's honor, we're also donating to the Alliance for the Great Lakes, which is a nonpartisan nonprofit working across the region to protect. Their most precious resource, the fresh, clean, and natural waters of the Great Lakes. So you can find out more about them at greatlakes.org. And thank you to sponsors of Ologies for making those donations possible. How's your ponytail looking?

• 31:21Alie Ward?

  Maybe like a little thinner than it used to? We've talked about this in our menopause episode. At some point, it's bound to happen to all of us. So if you're ready for thicker, fuller hair, start your free online visit today at forhers.com/ologies for personalized care. So that's F-O-R-H-E-R-S.com/ologies. Individual results may vary. Featured products include compounded drug products, which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness, or quality. Prescription required. Price varies based on product and subscription plan. See website for full details, restrictions, and important safety information. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. If you haven't heard me gushing about Squarespace for years, it's an all-in-one website platform. Whether you're trying to grow a business you have, or if you're just a baby business

• 32:06Alie Ward?

  getting started, it has everything you need. That's where I secured my domain name. It helped me build a professional site. I can update it so easily. I've been using Squarespace since before Ologies existed. After procrastinating for years, I literally built my website in one evening. They have templates, they have flexible editing tools. Squarespace also makes it easy to share your work. You can book clients, you can get paid. They have built-in tools for scheduling and invoicing and email all in one place. Whenever someone I know needs a website, whether they're a scientist that needs to put their work up, or someone who's just starting a business, I'm like, dude, Squarespace. So head to squarespace.com/ologies for a free trial.

• 32:47Alie Ward?

  And when you're ready to launch, use offer code OLOGIES to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. You can do it. Peppa Pig is your preschooler's best friend. Give the gift of bike riding confidence this year and help Peppa learn to ride her bike. Kids can imagine learning to ride a bike with the Ready Pedal Go Peppa Bicycle Playset. Put Peppa's helmet on, attach the push stick to her bike, and push to make her pedal. Ready Pedal Go Peppa and more from Peppa Pig are now available at all major retailers this holiday season.

• 33:25Speaker 04

  Hey, Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now, I don't know if you've heard, but Mint's premium wireless is $15 a month. But I'd like to offer one other perk. We have no stores. That means no small talk. Crazy weather we're having. No, it's not. It's just weather. It is an introvert's dream. Give it a try at mintmobile.com/switch.

• 33:48Speaker 05

  Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.

• 33:56Speaker 06

  I'm Livvy Dunn, all-American gymnast and Viori athlete. When you travel and train as much as I do, you find happiness where you are. On the mat or on the sand, movement and comfort are essential. That's why I live in Performance Joggers by Viori. Made from DreamNet fabric that's made of 89% recycled materials. Effortlessly soft and made to move as much as I do. My happiness starts here, in the softest joggers on the planet. Get 20% off your first purchase at viori.com/livy. That's V U O R I dot com slash L I V V Y. Exclusions apply. Not only will you receive 20% off your first purchase, but enjoy free shipping on US orders over $75 and free returns.

• 34:41Speaker 06

  Go to viori.com/livy and discover the full versatility of Viori clothing. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions.

• 34:53Alie Ward?

  Okay, let's slip below the surface into the fertile water of your Patreon questions, which collectively, I checked, contained 106 exclamation points. You love Gio, we love Gio. Okay, we have questions from listeners. Eleanor Wall wants to know.

• 35:10Alie Ward?

  Hello, Ally and Gio. I have exactly two words. Brine pools.

• 35:16Alie Ward?

  What can you tell us about brine pools, AKA underwater lakes? What is a brine pool?

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Oh, have you seen a video of them before, Ally?

• 35:24Alie Ward?

  I have, I'm unaware.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Okay, Google it while we're, while I tell you about it, because brine pools are extra spooky.

• 35:31Alie Ward?

  They look kind of like craters on the seafloor, but rimmed with this ridge of white, kind of like a margarita glass of gasliness.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  We find a lot of them in the Gulf of Mexico, because the Gulf of Mexico has this ancient salt deposit beneath the surface. And what happens is that salt kind of percolates up through what's called the salt tectonics, which is kind of cool. You have this salt kind of come up from the crust and it mixes with the water and it becomes brine, which is heavier than the surrounding ocean, which is already salty. So you have this extremely salty pool at the bottom of the ocean, which exists there because it's heavier. It's also anoxic, which means it has no oxygen in it. And so if any creatures, which are dependent on the dissolved oxygen in the ocean water, drift into one of these brine pools, they

• 36:23Speaker 02

  end up suffocating. It kind of ends up looking like they're getting shocked. Like, there's this famous video of an eel that's like convulsing in a brine pool. And it's because it doesn't have any oxygen in that pool and it's starting to like suffocate essentially. And so you have all these creatures that go like crabs and lobsters and all these things that go into these brine pools and then never come out again. And they're kind of preserved, they're pickled in these brine pools. And it's kind of fascinating. So yeah, I love brine pools.

• 36:52Alie Ward?

  So these brine pools, which can be up to five times as salty as the water around them, can happen under polar ice, via tectonic forces, or according to the 2017 paper, Study of Conrad and Chaban Deep Brines, Red Sea, Using Bathometric Parasound and Seismic Surveys. The brine pools can be formed from subsurface magmatic activity. But more importantly, I need you to know that a brine pool is also called a goo lagoon.

• 37:18Speaker 07

  Goo Lagoon, a stinky mud puddle for you and me.

• 37:22Alie Ward?

  Or in the words of one Discovery article, "A jacuzzi of despair." Gio says that some brine pools are really small, like itty bitty ponds, while others are enormous, like over a mile wide. But she loves brine pools, loves them.

• 37:37Alie Ward?

  I didn't even know they existed. Kaitlin Sexton, "I just want to let you know that Kaitlin said, 'This is the best day of my life.'"

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Hi, Kaitlin.

• 37:47Alie Ward?

  Are there any other spooky bodies of water Gio would like to spread the word about that do not fall under spooky lakes? And Katie Hammond said, "I remember Gio covering a spooky river, stream." Audrey asked about spooky rivers. Someone else asked, "Puren Fredberg, I got you. I do not got how to pronounce Shenei Tempiska, Tempiska."

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Shenei Tempiska.

• 38:08Alie Ward?

  Thank you about the boiling river. But yeah, so it's not just lakes that are spooky. At what point do you decide, "This fountain that has claimed some lives, let's educate people about it." Number one, because that is really good to know. And also, like, lake enough, you know?

• 38:26Speaker 02

  I think it's just this idea that water can kill you in like any form, whether it is something that is in a contained body of water or if it's one of these freak rainstorms. Like, one topic I did last year, which was like one of my favorite topics ever, which was just about subways that flood because there's like these inundations of water. And then where does the water go? It goes into the subway systems.

• 38:51Speaker 01

  Increasingly intense bursts of rain in increasingly brief periods of time has resulted in subway systems from around the world becoming the receptacles of floodwater. As extreme weather events become more frequent, we'll see more subway systems experience the same fate. These transitory tunnels now filled with rushing murky water echo the sound of the bustling city above.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  The subway systems end up like as literal cave diving scenarios. But I do love rivers and actually I'm writing and I already wrote and I'm illustrating spooky rivers. So I have like spooky lakes and then I'm doing spooky rivers right now. And then I eventually will do spooky seas.

• 39:33Alie Ward?

  Again, Gio's book Spooky Lakes absolutely beautifully illustrated. Like every page is a painting. The info was fascinating. You can go to spooky lakes.com to see her book or the coloring book, her merch. I love it. I find it so inspiring. Boy, howdy, hot dog. Speaking of hot.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  I visited the boiling river in Peru in June. I like just went to the boiling river with Andres Rousseau, who is like the scientist who brought the boiling river to international attention. But the native people knew about it for a very long time, but it's an unusual river because it's a river that truly boils. Where it's like over 200 degrees Fahrenheit. And if you fall in, people have fallen in, you might not survive because you essentially get like a crazy third degree burn over your whole body. And it's an interesting place because unlike in Yellowstone, which is also a spooky lake topic, where the water is full of heavy metals and toxins and stuff like that from coming up from a volcanic source.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  This boiling river in Peru is clean, which is really weird. And, and scientists don't even really like a hundred percent understand why that's happening. Is it because the rock is acting as like a filter? Is it like, what is happening there that's making the water boil and be really clean? And so we, in the morning, we would go down to the river with our teacups and our, our tea bags. And you just go and you scoop a cup of water from the river and then you have tea in the morning. So it's like kind of an incredible place to visit because it's like, you can't do that anywhere else. Like do not do that anywhere else in the world, but you can do it at the boiling river.

• 41:07Alie Ward?

  I was gonna say, Giardia, be damned. It's because it just kills microbes that might be not great for you.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So definitely think that rivers are spooky and deserve a lot of like love and attention because they, but they just don't. I think that like even after writing this book and I'm currently illustrating it, rivers are more spooky because of like rapids and because of flooding and because of the way that civilizations build themselves around rivers. And then rivers. Deceive them, like rivers turn around and like destroy things. And that's kind of what's more spooky about rivers is like they're just, they're killers, you know? And so unlike lakes where like lakes are just kind of chilling there and they're not really doing anything, but they got, they got secrets at the bottom. So it's like a different type of spooky.

• 41:56Alie Ward?

  Yeah, it seems active versus passive almost in a, in a certain way. It's like you, you fell into it, that's your problem, but a river will take you by the hand and, and try to kill you. What about different colored lakes? Clouds, bugs and shrooms wanted to know about Pink Lake in Australia. What's up with that? Matt Herschel also asked about the Western Australia salty lake called Lake Hillier. And I Google it, it looks like if Barbie had a waterfront vacation home. Or like maybe a sea of Pepto Bismol in the best way. It's eerie, more like Pepto Abysmal.

• 42:29Speaker 07

  Nice.

• 42:30Alie Ward?

  And Felipe Jimenez asked, hi, Ali. In northern Chile's Atacama Desert, there are high altitude lakes like Laguna Roja and Laguna Verde that are strikingly colored, deep red, turquoise, even milky white. Many of these lakes are also considered sacred or dangerous by local communities. Felipe, great question. A lot of you asked, rainbow lakes, how? Sarah Mans also asked if there are spooky lakes in Australia and mentioned a blue lake in Mount Gambier, hot lagoons. So yeah, things that are different colors. What's up with that?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  There's actually, I feel like there's lakes that have come in like almost every color of the rainbow. There's actually a set of lakes in Indonesia that look like a mood ring. They've like changed into all these different colors.

• 43:12Alie Ward?

  And according to one article, the volcano whose lake waters change color. These three different lakes of varying hues are right next door to each other. They're divided by like a thin fence of rock, kind of like a septum in the volcano of your nose.

• 43:28Speaker 02

  So any lake that is connected to a volcano has the potential of being like weird, wacky colors. So like Kawahijen is like neon blue. And you get these lakes, like any lake that has these different types of minerals coming up. It could be black, it could be red, it could be orange, it could be like any of those weird colors as a result. Lake Hillier, though, is a little different. I have talked about Lake Hillier. I've talked about pink lakes in general because there's a lot of pink lakes on Earth. There's a lot of amazing pink lakes on Earth, including like Lake Repba in Senegal. You know, even our Great Salt Lake here in the United States is often a pink lake, and that's because of the salt content. So these pink lakes are usually salty, and as a result of the

• 44:11Speaker 02

  salt, you end up with this pink algae that grows. And the pink algae is also sustains a population of brine shrimp, which are also pink. And the brine shrimp, plus the pink algae, you end up with these, like, this little community of pink things that live together. This is also how flamingos turn pink, because flamingos go to pink lakes, also like Lake Natron in Tanzania, and they eat the brine shrimp, and as a result, they turn pink. And so like, all of these things are connected to the pink algae, which kind of sustains this, this little pink population on these bodies of water.

• 44:48Alie Ward?

  Okay, but Lake Hillier, the Pepto Bismol C, is fading. And there was a 2022 study titled "Microbiome and Metagenomic Analysis of Lake Hillier, Australia Reveals Pigment-Rich Polyextremophiles and Wide-Ranging Metabolic Adaptations." This is in the journal Environmental Biome, and it says that "Our data indicate that the microbiome in Lake Hillier is composed of multiple pigment producer microbes, many of which are catalogued as polyextremophiles." But a little good news, bad news. According to a 2025 article, "Western Australia's Lake Hillier loses iconic pink color, but there is strong hope for its recovery." There

• 45:28Alie Ward?

  was a massive offshore rainfall event in 2022, which diluted the salt levels, but scientists say that the pink color will eventually be restored when the water evaporates and the water level drops. Also, I was researching this aside, I was listening to music, and the song "Moon Begins" by the band Floris came on, and the lyrics, as I'm researching this aside, were-

• 46:00Alie Ward?

  Death will come, then a cloud of love. There's no land like the water's edge. Spooky, but yes, the critters and minerals in the pink lake will return like a cloud of love, full of polyextremophiles, many of which you patrons asked about, including Teresa Gleason, Kathleen, Bug in a Rug, Chuck Miriam, Clara Stavonov Wagner, Reese Perini, Jesse Crawford, Earl of Grammalkin, and one very rare, nearly extinct species living in weird places. It looks like a cobalt blue goldfish, and we mentioned them earlier in this episode and in this phleology episode about caves. In Ray's words, can we please talk about pupfish and why they're the coolest fish?

• 46:40Speaker 02

  Yes, that's like the Devil's Hole. There's a couple of different pupfish, which are unique to these different pools of water in that desert area in the American Southwest. So there's, there's the pupfish in Devil's Hole, which I think are the most famous pupfish, because we've put millions of dollars into like researching and studying these pupfish in this hole in the middle of the desert, and that makes some people mad. Some people are like, why are we putting millions of dollars into these pupfish? They're the only ones of their species. I think that at one point, there was like less than 20 of them alive. And the funny thing about Devil's Hole is that the pupfish are interesting, but Devil's Hole actually has this enormous lake of water beneath it that the pupfish,

• 47:22Speaker 02

  the pupfish are living at like the top little speck of water, like near the surface where the sun is hitting. But actually, that place, that hole, has like killed people. Like, people have dived down there and died as a result. These pupfish are sharing that hole with the dead of the past, which we have never retrieved. So I do love pupfish. I think extremophiles are really interesting. A lot of extremophiles in these salty, acidic bodies of water from volcanic locations. And then, um, one of my favorite extremophiles are the extremophiles that they study at Rio Tinto, which is the river in Spain, which is red and orange. Like, if you Google it, it's like one of the craziest looking rivers

• 48:01Speaker 02

  in the world. And it's because they have mined copper there for like 2,000 years. And all of that mining runoff, all of that like toxic runoff, has turned this river like neon orange and neon red. And NASA has actually gone there to take samples to study extremophiles, because it's like one of the strangest, unique environments on earth that's kind of a human byproduct. So. There's tons of those that I think are just so fascinating.

• 48:28Alie Ward?

  Now, some of your questions, including Kelly Lee's, Aubrey Nelson's, Amanda Lask, Rowan Tree, Rachel Gentile, Katie Hammond, Aubrey Nelson, JMO, and Bobby Balducci, started with, um, yes, hello, and other big fans such as Jen A., Sally Warren, RJ, Taylor, and Gio Sassi wanted to know, have you seen any in person that really dazzled you?

• 48:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of the ones that I'm talked about are really hard to get to. Like, it is hard to get to, like, Natron and Tanzania. I think a good example that would be easy to get to, but I have not been myself, is Yellowstone. Yellowstone is like a hotbed for strange, wet environments, which are a result of this volcanic activity.

• 49:07Alie Ward?

  I saw your video about the geyser that has changed colors over the years because there's garbage in it.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:15Alie Ward?

  And there's just so many pennies that they tried to blow out there.

• 49:17Speaker 02

  That was so funny, because like, that wasn't even one of my official Spooky Lake videos, but I like, thought the topic was really interesting, so I just made it that night, like, right after making my Spooky Lake video on the Yellowstone, I made that video like, as a throwaway video.

• 49:30Alie Ward?

  And it was more popular than like, the rest of the videos from that month.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  But as you can see, the color palette really does not sync up. And that's because it used to be blue, like the morning glory flower. People threw so much debris and garbage into the pool that it actually changed the chemistry of the water.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, that was a geyser which we threw so much trash into that we actually, like, changed the temperature of the water, and that changed the color of it. The thermophiles, which are like, hot-loving extremophiles, like, shifted and changed. And so that's a fascinating one as well.

• 50:06Alie Ward?

  I had no idea. I was watching that and just thinking like, no, so many, like, eighty-six dollars in pennies, like, come on, guys.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:15Alie Ward?

  Andrew McVeigh, Curtis Dog, and Meg Zeroni wanted to know about Crater Lake in southern Oregon. Andrew says, only filled with rain and snow and the level drops over the summer, but there's no clear outlet that scientists have found, huh? Curtis Dog wants to know about the ghost log floating around Crater Lake. Have you heard of that?

• 50:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, old man of, uh, Crater Lake. Um, so old man of the lake is an old hemlock stump. Which is like a 400 year old tree that has been in the lake for as long as we have record, like we have a picture of this stump from like the 1800s, it's been around for that long. It's a deadhead stump, which is not in and itself unique. Deadhead stumps happen a lot where the tree itself becomes waterlogged, but then like the top half of it kind of doesn't get waterlogged and, and remains dry and it kind of becomes like a cork where it's bobbing in the water. But underneath the water, like you see the top half of this stump, it's huge. It's huge, by the way. It's like you could stand on

• 51:12Speaker 02

  it. And then there's like, I think there's 30, 40 feet beneath the surface of this log.

• 51:19Alie Ward?

  What?

• 51:19Speaker 02

  But if it's a calm day on the Crater Lake, then you can see that entire log underneath the surface. It freaks people out. People love it. But there is a conspiracy theory about the Old Man of the Lake, which is that if you tie him up, like scientists apparently wanted to like study and get him out of the way, like we gotta keep the Old Man out of here. Like, let's tie him up. So he tied him up. And there was this crazy storm on Crater Lake that like, didn't stop until they released the Old Man.

• 51:43Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  People like think the Old Man kind of is almost like a spirit that kind of is present at Crater Lake.

• 51:50Alie Ward?

  So I looked at pictures. It looks like if a giant cigar with a bitten end were bobbing in a glass of blue liqueur. And the exposed tip of this big hemlock behemoth is weathered and white and jagged. It looks like a stump surrounded in a placid sea, but it moves around, sometimes up to three miles a day, but always vertically. And you can see it for yourself if you have a time machine, because it looks like the trail to this gorgeous lake, which was formed by a volcano surrounded by steep rocky cliffs, will be closed from this fall until 2029. So, set your time machines to last year or 2029 to see the Old Man yourself.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  You can take the boat and the boat, if you're lucky, on that boat ride with National Park Service, it'll take you to pass the Old Man and you can go say hi to him.

• 52:41Alie Ward?

  I want to go say hi to him.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really fun.

• 52:44Alie Ward?

  So what's next?

• 52:45Alie Ward?

  Um, Lake Baikal?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Actually, I was gonna say, Ally, if we didn't talk about Lake Baikal, I was gonna bring her up.

• 52:52Alie Ward?

  Okay, good, good, good, good, good.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  That's how important it is. We like, we always have to talk about Lake Baikal. It always needs to come up. Everybody needs to know about Lake Baikal. Like, the world needs to know about Lake Baikal. And if they don't, then they gotta listen to this podcast. Lake Baikal is the weirdest lake in the world. It's the weirdest. It's the oldest lake in the world. How do we know? We can test rock and like, we know because it's one of these tectonic lakes. So it's actually similar to Lake Tahoe in that it's like more, it's not a lake created from glaciers. It's a lake where the earth is like pulling apart. Same with the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea is really old and it's really deep. The Dead Sea is like 900 feet deep. It's crazy. And these are places where the earth is like pulling apart or there's like a tectonic rift of some kind. Like Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and Peru, same thing, where it's like on this rift valley.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  So we know that Lake Baikal is the oldest lake in the world. It's 25 million years old. Phew, just so you know, that's got nothing on the oldest river in the world, which is in Australia, which is the Finke River, which is 400 million years old.

• 53:51Alie Ward?

  A lot of you had Baikal on the brains, like Adzy, hermeneutologist Eleanor Wall, Clay O'Morman, Tommy McElrath, and Robin Kuhn, who asked, can you talk about Lake Baikal? It's the first spooky lake that came to mind. What with the 5,000-foot depth and the super clear freshwater and the seals? And then an interrobbing.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  Anyway, Lake Baikal, though, is the oldest lake in the world and it's also the deepest lake. So it's over a mile deep. So it's 5,387 feet deep. And feel free to fact check me on that because I know it's right. That's correct. It is the deepest lake. And just for comparison, so we were just talking about Crater Lake. Crater Lake is something like 1,900 feet deep. So it's like pretty deep, but it's not over a mile deep. So 5,387 feet deep is really deep. And because of that, you know, I told you that rivers usually kill lakes because they bring sediment in. So there's over 300 rivers that are carrying sediment into Lake Baikal. But because it's a rift lake where the rift is like being pulled apart on the Baikal Rift Zone.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  All of that sediment is just disappearing into the rift underneath the surface. So even though it's over a mile deep, it's even deeper than that. If you go to like the bottom of the rift where all that sediment has been building up. So it's like over 20,000 feet underneath the surface where that sediment has been building up. So Baikal is lucky, we're really lucky because it's in Russia, it's in Siberia, it's in the middle of nowhere. It's actually hard to get to. And we're lucky because, because it has a very unique ecosystem. Where 80% of the species that live in Lake Baikal are endemic to Lake Baikal. So they can only be found at Lake Baikal. We're talking about the Baikal amphipod, which is like this weird crustacean.

• 55:35Speaker 02

  We're talking about the Golem Yanka fish, which is one of these deep sea fish, but it's not a sea fish. It's a lake fish. It's like lives at the very bottom of Lake Baikal underneath all that enormous pressure. And we have the most famous, I think, is the Baikal Nerpa, which is a seal. But like their ancestors, like we can still connect them to their Arctic ancestors. Not at Lake Baikal. These seals, we have no idea how they got there. They've been there for some 2 million years. They've evolved to live at Lake Baikal. And luckily their population is doing well. I think that that's something we can't really say about a lot of things in the world right now. But luckily the Baikal Nerpa is doing pretty well.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  The Baikal Nerpa.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  You know, isn't this so cute? Actually, look, I just did a, I did an enamel pin this year for the Baikal Nerpa.

• 56:30Alie Ward?

  A sweet little cartoon seal with whiskers and a smile like a little bright eyed infant. How did these get so far inland? I pictured them just hopping along on their guts to get there. Or maybe they boarded a smoky Greyhound bus decades ago. But our pinnipedology expert on seals, Dr. Lewis Huckstat, told me that at some point, there was a channel that connected Lake Baikal to the sea, and it allowed these little Nerpa seals to kind of float there like a log flume ride.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  That's like the thing that I think people are always really excited about. They're like, why can't we have a seal in the Great Lakes? And it's like, well, give the Great Lakes another couple of million years and then maybe. Yeah, but unlike the Great Lakes are more likely to fill in or to drain because they're not on a rift where it's like continually opening. So yeah, we love Lake Baikal on Spooky Lake Month, even though unlike Lake Superior, which has this history of ships, which makes it, that's like what gives it a lot of oomph, a lot of like history and spooky power. Like Baikal doesn't have that type of history as much because people were not using it as transit. They did build a train across it in the middle of the winter, though, in 1904. So it's still, it's, it still has a little bit of a morbid history on that front where like giant,

• 57:41Speaker 02

  you know, pieces of this train would crack and go through the ice.

• 57:45Alie Ward?

  Also, this is apparently what it sounds like, just if you skate over the ice in Lake Baikal and it cracks.

• 58:00Alie Ward?

  Terrifying, absolutely. And during the war between Japan and Russia in 1904, a Russian train carrying soldiers crashed through the ice of the lake. And reports via telegraph said that there were an unknown number of casualties as troops jumped out of windows trying to swim through the icy waters to safety. Shiver me timbers.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  But yeah, that's a whole nother story. So yeah, we love Lake Baikal. It's very spooky.

• 58:24Alie Ward?

  Well, you did mention Great Lakes. Catherine Crawford, Molly, Danny Kirby, Clouds, Bugs and Shrooms, wanted to know, Clouds asked, why are there so many shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, especially Superior in Michigan? I'm a backpacking guide out here and I always wonder why almost every trip involves learning about a new shipwreck.

• 58:43Speaker 02

  So the Great Lakes have been a shipping behemoth for over a century. We built the Welland Canal, which connects Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and that kind of like let all these ships in from around the world. So there are some 10,000 shipwrecks in the Great Lakes. But Lake Superior, I think, has the deadliest reputation because, this is kind of an interesting science reason. So Lake Superior gets this November gale because the water is warm leading into November, and you get a storm system that kind of comes across the United States and it picks up speed with that hot water kind of releasing, like evaporating into and making the storm

• 59:24Speaker 02

  even more insane. So Lake Superior gets like the craziest storms of the bunch of them. And there's like up to 30 foot waves on the lake. And unlike in the ocean, where you have a giant wave, but it's like a giant wave that like comes in these like widespread apart sets. But the Great Lakes waves are different because they're only created from wind, not from any tide. And so as a result, the waves are super close together. So they're really tight. And so you just can be like absolutely buffeted by these waves in Lake Superior during a storm. And then your ship just can't handle it. Like it can handle it in the ocean. It can't handle it here in the Great Lakes. So it's just a different type of shipping experience. And the water can freeze in the ocean. Like you're not going to get frozen ice on the boat because

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  of the salt. Great Lakes, your boat is completely covered in icicles. It could be just a giant icicle as a result. And so that's kind of what makes Lake Superior just so different and special because it's so cold and people are shipping there like all the way into the winter. And like I told you guys about, you know, you get, she never gives up her dead. So people are like down at the bottom.

• 1:00:31Alie Ward?

  And again, if you like things at the bottom of lakes or the sea, you will love our Maritime Archaeology episode with Chanel Zaffaropoulos. We chatted about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. And I'd just like to include a clip from that Maritime Archaeology episode with Chanel to give us some backstory here.

• 1:00:47Alie Ward?

  We got a lot of questions about my dad's favorite song. Megan Stingle, Gwen Zimmer, Vanessa Frye, Baloney Shoes, and Emily Stanislavsky, and also, I'm going to guess, my dad, Mr. Larry Ward. Want to know, does everyone ask you about the Edmund Fitzgerald after finding that you study shipwrecks because the song is already stuck in my head? Gwen wants to know, is it your favorite song?

• 1:01:30Alie Ward?

  So yes, is, how many times have you heard it?

• 1:01:33Speaker 08

  Many times. I love Gordon Lightfoot. I think it's a great example of how broad maritime culture is because like, music is a huge part of it. When you look at sea shanties and whatnot, it's basically a sea shanty. It's like a love song to a ship.

• 1:01:49Alie Ward?

  So Gordon Lightfoot is a Canadian folk song hero, and he wrote this in 1975 after seeing just a little blurb in the back of a Newsweek magazine about the Edmund Fitzgerald, which sunk in a November storm. And Lightfoot recalled that they spelled Edmund wrong in the article, and he was just so sad that 29 lives, all crew members were lost, could amount to just a little afterthought in the news. So he wrote that ditty the next week, and the world has remembered her ever since. And the ship's victims remain with the wreck in the cold, cold, cold waters of Lake Superior, who they say never gives up her dead. It's cold enough that they stay pretty well preserved and wouldn't float up by decomposition. But

• 1:02:31Alie Ward?

  the bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald has been retrieved at the behest of family members and has been rung in memorials, some of which Gordon Lightfoot has attended. And he also set up a scholarship fund at Northwestern Michigan College, where two crewmen were cadets. So yes, Grand Padward, he has good sea song taste.

• 1:02:49Speaker 08

  And it's like, it's not even a ship from like antiquity. It's like, you know, a freighter from the Great Lakes from like, what was it, 1875 or like, something like that. It's like, it's recent. And I love that. I love that it inspired somebody so much to create this like, absolute jam.

• 1:03:08Alie Ward?

  It is. What a bop. It's a bop of maritime antiquity.

• 1:03:13Speaker 08

  Yes, it's fantastic. Yeah, I love any sort of sea shanties, though, or just like, any song about the sea is fantastic.

• 1:03:20Speaker 02

  It really makes me want to raise a mug of rum or something.

• 1:03:23Alie Ward?

  Again, that was from the Maritime Archaeology episode about shipwrecks with Chanel Zap, who is known online by the handle Sharks and Rex. Absolute delight. Okay, back to Gio. Do you have one of those bumper stickers that's like, "Don't honk at me, I'm crying," to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald?

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. I have one. I have an extra one, Ally. You want me to send it to you? I have it hanging up over there in my, in my studio.

• 1:03:47Alie Ward?

  That's my dad's favorite song. Favorite song.

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think I have to do Edmund Fitzgerald this year because it's the 50th anniversary this year of the Edmund Fitzgerald, November 11th, 1975? I think it's the 11th.

• 1:04:01Alie Ward?

  Sounds right. Sounds right.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  Maybe it's the 9th. I don't, okay, guys, I'm sorry. I don't remember the exact date.

• 1:04:06Alie Ward?

  It was neither the 11th nor the 9th. It was the 10th. So I'm going to count Gio Right Enough twice. Oh, it's such a chilling tale. Such a chilling song. A couple more listener questions, if that's okay. Turner Pierce, Amanda Lander, Sarah Mans, Bjorn Fredberg, and Brittany Bryce Enyo wanted to know, again, people very excited. Brittany says, "As soon as I saw Spooky Lakes, I knew you must be interviewing Gio." Freaking out, freaking out, freaking out. Turner Pierce says, "OMG Gio, what happens to towns that get flooded to make lakes? Does that cause any weird happenings with the lakes that are observable? Does the flooding destroy the houses or are they all just sitting there under the lake? The whole towns, like Atlantis? What's going on?"

• 1:04:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. This is something that happens like across the world. The whole world is building dams and then flooding river valleys. And as a result, you end up with these preserved towns or trees or things that are underneath the water. I think that the most famous one in the United States is Lake Lanier. I think, Lake Lanier is interesting because it has like a history of like the town that was flooded was a majority black community. But I think it has a reputation of being kind of the most iconic of these. Flooded reservoirs, but there's supposedly a town at the bottom. Supposedly, they're supposed to move the graves and like relocate these towns and these communities and the dead, but they don't necessarily always do that.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  And we don't always know where people are buried. And so there's kind of this, this idea that we're kind of submerging these entire histories underneath the water. Like Lake Mead, there was like an entire town that got completely flooded and it reappears as the lake levels kind of drop. So we had like, I did Lake Mead in 2022 because it was like the lowest lake level we'd ever seen of Lake Mead.

• 1:05:58Speaker 01

  In the last 20 years, Lake Mead has been shrinking and this past summer was the worst year on record. Water levels have been so low that they've revealed at least six different sets of human remains. So as the West continues to deal with record-breaking drought because of climate change, Lake Mead will continue to share her secrets. Seven out of 10 spookies.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  And there was like all sorts of gross stuff that was kind of popping up, like a barrel that was full of human remains.

• 1:06:27Alie Ward?

  So Lake Mead is really a huge reservoir just outside Las Vegas and it was made from the diverting of the Colorado River for the Hoover Dam. And due to these falling water levels, the receding shores have unveiled all kinds of past tragedy. And in 2022, a barrel containing a human body was revealed, a probable homicide from a single gunshot wound to the head. And investigators hoping to solve the crime reported that the victim likely died in the 1970s using his clothes to date it. And he was wearing shoes and an outfit from the discount retailer Kmart at the time of his death. And mafia murders were not unheard of. And I saw one speculation that the affordable wardrobe on the victim suggests maybe he

• 1:07:12Alie Ward?

  was like a service worker or just a regular Joe who saw too much and was disposed of in the lake and his identity is still unknown. Weeks after that discovery in 2022, another set of human remains was found in the drying mudbanks and DNA traced to his children who have been grieving their dad for 20 years after he drowned on this nighttime boat ride in 2002. His name was Thomas Ernst and he was 42. He was a single dad. He took his two kids out for a night swim, as they often did when he got off work, and he vanished under the water. And his kids, now grown, told the media that the 2022 discovery of his body afforded them some closure,

• 1:07:54Alie Ward?

  but also reopened some wounds of that grief from losing their dad. So what happens in Vegas stays in Lake Mead until the water levels drop. And it's spooky and it's sad, as are all of these tragedies that play out below the waves of the world.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  China has a lot of spooky lakes, but unfortunately, China's a little hard to research. Like China's one of the lakes, the one of the countries that it's hard to find stuff, unless you're like maybe searching in, I don't know, Chinese. And so I did Kaiando Lake, which is a lake that was flooded. But their city, unlike Lake and Lanier, with this city that they flooded was like a thousand year old city. And the city, the, you know, all of the brick and the rock from this city is like completely preserved, all these buildings are preserved. And you can like see all the beautiful ornate carvings on the lake, or on, not on the lake, on the city that are still there underneath the water. And divers have like gone down to visit it.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's kind of, it's interesting. That's like, yeah, that's a topic that I could probably do forever. It's just places we've flooded and then now there's things at the bottom that are kind of, we don't know. It's a calls back to that, like, once something is beneath the surface and you don't know, then it's pretty spooky.

• 1:09:10Alie Ward?

  But I like it.

• 1:09:12Alie Ward?

  The last listener question I was gonna ask, Jason E. Farabaugh, I did not know about this, asked about recursive islands in lakes.

• 1:09:19Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:20Alie Ward?

  Third order, fourth order, fifth order islands. I did not know what this was. This is a lake on an island in a lake that's on an island. What the fuck? What is going on?

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  This one to me is not that spooky, but it's kind of fun. It's just like a fun fact. There's viral like picture of, I think it was like called Bear Island, which was an island in a lake on the Isle of Royale in the Lake of Lake Superior, right? And so people are like, oh, my God, like, look at this tiny island on this tiny lake, on this island, on this lake, on this island, on this lake, so on and so on and so forth. I think my favorite one is Talal. So Talal is a giant lake, which is a lake on this island in Indonesia. And there's a volcano in the middle and the volcano has a lake in the crater.

• 1:10:13Speaker 02

  And that lake has an island on it, which I think did explode in two thousand twenty one or twenty two or something like that. So that that might not be true anymore. But for a long time, that was like one of my favorite examples of recursive lakes. Because it was like this ocean with an island with an lake with an island with a lake with an island.

• 1:10:34Alie Ward?

  Like a nesting doll.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  It is. It's a nesting doll. Yeah.

• 1:10:38Alie Ward?

  I did not even know that was a thing.

• 1:10:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 1:10:42Alie Ward?

  Yeah, I want to be like a little tiny elf that lives on a tiny island and a bigger and bigger and bigger. And then no, having no cell phone service.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  Definitely don't have any cell phone service on Isle Royale, so you could head there.

• 1:10:57Alie Ward?

  Bye, bye, everyone. What is the hardest part about? I usually ask hardest part about your job, but as long as we're doing perlatives. Do you, is there a scariest lake? Is there the creepiest you've ever felt? Is there anything that's like haunted you since researching it?

• 1:11:20Speaker 02

  I always answer that the ultimate spooky lake that like wins unfortunate award of being like an actual killer is Lake Nios in Cameroon. Have you heard about Lake Nios?

• 1:11:34Alie Ward?

  No, I'm about to.

• 1:11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's my favorite, like, it's my favorite horror story essentially of what a lake has the potential to do. So there's only a few lakes in this world which have the potential to explode that we know of. Okay, so Lake Nios is in the belly of a volcano in Cameroon. So it's kind of on a bit of a hill and it's in this crater. And in the crater, it's like a nine hundred foot deep lake. So it's a really deep lake and you have this volcanic activity that's kind of percolating up from the bottom. And that volcanic activity is resulting in carbon dioxide that is dissolved in the water that's being trapped at the bottom of this lake by pressure, but also just the cold depths of the lake.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  The carbon dioxide gas is like being kept down there. Until.

• 1:12:26Speaker 02

  I think it was nineteen eighty-four, in the middle of the night, something disrupted the carbon dioxide gas that was at the bottom of this lake, and it exploded, which really, if you were standing there, would have looked like a bunch of bubbles on the surface. And like, you wouldn't have been able to see anything, and you wouldn't have been able to smell anything. But carbon dioxide gas, which is heavier than the surrounding air, would have been creeping out of this lake over the edge of the crater, and then heading down to low-lying valleys.

• 1:12:59Alie Ward?

  Oh.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  And unfortunately, there is an entire community that lived in a low-lying valley next to Lake Nios. So eighteen hundred, over eighteen hundred people died in their sleep. All of their, all of their animals, all of their livestock, and even all the bugs. And so the next day, when scientists like made their way here, because this was like a mystery, nobody understood what had happened, because everybody, nothing, didn't look like anything, right? Didn't, there was no evidence left behind by this disaster. And so they eventually figured out that it was Lake Nios. This is called a Limmick eruption. There was a lake a few years before this, Lake Manoon, which had erupted in a similar way, but had not

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  had such a huge death toll. And there's a lake in the Rwanda area, like over in the Great African Rift, it's called Lake Kivu. It's like on the border of Republic of Congo and Malawi. And Lake Kivu is a humongous lake that has the potential to also explode. But unlike this lake in Cameroon that was near a very small village, Lake Kivu is next to millions of people. The city of Goma is right on the edge of the lake. And so if Lake Kivu were to ever have a Limmick eruption, it could kill millions of people.

• 1:14:21Alie Ward?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  Because of that carbon dioxide.

• 1:14:24Alie Ward?

  Whoa.

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  To me, that's kind of like the ultimate spooky lake, is like a lake that could actually do the killing. Like, this lake is deadly in and of itself. Um, it's not just because of human stupidity, it actively just let off this gas explosion.

• 1:14:38Alie Ward?

  In any time, it could.

• 1:14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it could happen at any time. Now, I think that they've put in safety measures to both Lake Nios and to Lake Kivu to try to release that gas. So like a pipe to the bottom that like tries to offset that buildup. Because some people say that it was a landslide that like caused the carbon dioxide gas to be disrupted, but it seems like it could also just be like at a point it just pops where it's just too much.

• 1:15:05Alie Ward?

  Okay, what about one that you are really excited about one day visiting?

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Ooh, I mean, unfortunately, the answer to that is that I want to go to Lake Baikal. There's no other.

• 1:15:16Alie Ward?

  Oh, you gotta meet a seal. You have to.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I gotta go. I gotta go to Lake Baikal. But there's this giant train that goes all the way from Moscow, all the way across Russia to Lake Baikal. I want to do that so badly, but I think it's harder to communicate and to be kind of isolated in Russia.

• 1:15:33Alie Ward?

  Do you know, what about scientists who work with the Baikal NERVA?

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, hello, if anybody's listening and they somehow go to Lake Baikal for scientific reasons, then take me with you.

• 1:15:46Speaker 02

  Please. I just did, that was the trip I did with the Boiling River was with a bunch of scientists, which was really fun. So I was like there as, they were like, what are you doing here? And I was like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm just here.

• 1:15:59Alie Ward?

  So you're like, I'm drinking tea. It's a write-off. Don't worry about it.

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So take me as a comedic relief content creator artist. I will draw you if you take me.

• 1:16:12Alie Ward?

  Well, thank you so much for doing this. You're a legend.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  Thanks so much for having me, Ally. It was so much fun.

• 1:16:18Alie Ward?

  So ask creative people creepy questions. And thank you so much to Gio Rutherford for taking the time to answer the call of Ologites the world over and share your haunted hydrology with us. We will link Gio's TikTok and social medias in the show notes. Very easy to find. Look up haunted hydrology anywhere you get social media. And we will also link her wonderful book, Spooky Lakes. And do enjoy her fresh cuts all through October as she celebrates Spooky Lake Month with us all. There are more links up at alieward.com/ologies/honkedhydrology, including ways to donate to the Salt and Sea Action Committee and the Alliance for the Great Lakes. We are at Ologies on Blue Sky on Instagram. I'm at @AllyWard with one L on both. Smologies are those shorter, classroom-saving versions of Ologies classics.

• 1:17:01Alie Ward?

  They're available wherever you get podcasts and you can also sign up at patreon.com/ologies to send in your questions ahead of recording. Erin Talbert admins the Ologies Podcast Facebook group. Aveline Malik makes our professional transcripts. Callie R. Dwyer does the website. Noelle Dilworth is on top of our recording forecast as scheduling producer. Managing Director Susan Hale gets us safely ashore to the publish button every week. And navigating the edits are Jake Chaffee and Captain Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, here we are. I tell you a secret this week. It's that it just occurred to me like last week that navigation and Navy have the same root word, which is ship. It never even dawned on me before that navigation means literally steering a ship.

• 1:17:46Alie Ward?

  This is why our motto is to ask smart people not smart questions. Some things have been sailing over my head for decades. Also, wear a life vest, please. Can you? Thank you. Okay. Bye bye. Oh, also, November 17th, Bell House, Brooklyn. Tickets go on sale on Thursdays. See you there, bye.

• 1:18:23Speaker 01

  10 out of 10 spookies.

• 1:18:27Speaker 09

  Walmart shoppers, meet the debit card design with you in mind. The Walmart Money Card offers up to $75 cash back on purchases at Walmart each year. Early direct deposit, overdraft protection, and so much more. When Walmart is your everyday store, you need a card to match. That's the Walmart Money Card. Open your account today. The Walmart Money Card is issued by Green Dot Bank, Member FDIC. Fees, terms, and conditions apply. Visit walmartmoneycard.com to learn more.