Florida has a very dynamic limestone karst topography that is found rarely around the world. Over millions of years, the interaction of limestone and moving water has turned this area's seemingly flat terrain into a widespread limestone karst configuration that includes amazing water caverns, drainage basins, disappearing rivers, flowing springs, collapsing sinkholes, circular lakes, and subsurface aquifers.
This perfectly round lake was made by spring water making a depression or hole in the ground, caused by a form of collapse of the surface layer. Limestone karst erodes versy easly. As the spring water flowed underground, more and more limestone weathered away, and an under ground cave developed and grew. Eventually, the ground above to collapise and the water filled the resuting sinkhole.
A spring is the result of an aquifer being filled to the point that the water overflows onto the land surface. They range in size from intermittent seeps, which flow only after much rain, to huge pools flowing hundreds of gallons daily. The spring here is a first magnitude spring. Florida has more first magnitude springs then any other states.A spring's magnitude is determined by the volume of flow per unit at a time.First magnitude are the largest springs and discharge at least 64.6 million gallons of water per day, or 100 cubic feet per second.
When weak carbonic acid (formed by rainwater absorbing carbon dioxide and percolating through organic matter in the soil) enters fractures in the bedrock, it dissolves the limestone. When it reaches a layer of non-dissolving rock such as sandstone or shale, it begins to cut sideways. As the process continues, the water hollows out more rock, eventually admitting an airspace, at which point the spring stream can be called a cave. These caves channel the water to the lake feeding it with water in a process called Spring discharge, which is the natural discharge point of the water.
Types of springs
Seepage or filtration spring. The term seep refers to springs with small flow rates, in which the source water has filtered through permeable earth. These are sometimes referred to as wet weather springs.
Fracture springs discharge from faults, joints, or fissures in the earth, in which water has followed a natural course of voids or weaknesses in the bedrock.
Tubular springs, in which the water flows from caverns.
Wonky holes are freshwater submarine exit points for coral and sediment covered sediment filled old river channels.
Now you must answer these questions to log the cache. Please send me an email or message with the answers; do not post them in your log. Please follow the rules of the park as well.
1 What type of spring is it?
2 How did this lake form?
3 Explian how water erosion effects the limestone underground ?
4 Do you see any outlet of water? If not, where do you think the water goes?
5 Take a picture of you at the lake and post it to your log
congrats to brcross95 for the first to find and a big thank you to geoawareUSA9 for helping me in getting this cache puplished