lakes

The idea of extraterrestrial boating comes from planetary geologist (and sailing enthusiast) Ellen Stofan, who points out that one of Saturn's moons, Titan, is covered with lakes, and in fact is one of only two places in our solar system known to have surface liquid (the other being Earth, of course). So why not launch a floating probe? After all, to date all extraterrestrial endeavors have involved either flight or land navigation, so perhaps it's time to switch it up a little.

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To live on the banks of Africa’s Lake Kivu is to risk your life every day. Large amounts of methane, carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulfide gas are dissolved in various layers of the lake’s deep waters. Scientists warn that a disturbance such as a volcanic eruption or earthquake could cause a redistribution of the lake’s waters and the gases in them. This shuffling, known as an overturn, could unleash an invisible, suffocating cloud of these compounds—a rare event known as a limnic eruption—killing as many as two million people nearby.

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The Aral Sea, located between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, was once the fourth largest lake on the planet. Decades of irrigation works diverting water from the two rivers which fed it have left the sea today at 10 percent of the size it once was. Much of what remains is heavily polluted, devoid of fish, and surrounded by a great empty bed of salt which often blows into the surrounding areas, wrecking crops and contaminating drinking water. We might be tempted to write off the disaster as a consequence of the lumbering Soviet bureaucracy, something that could never happen in the States. But as the Plains face consecutive droughts and the Western states continue to burn, all eyes turn to the Great Lakes to fill the growing voids.

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