Lake Geneva
Astronaut Randy Bresnik captured this photo of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva from the International Space Station earlier this month. The lake sits in a valley carved by repeated Pleistocene glaciations in the Alps. The Rhone River flows into the lake in the east, forming a delta at that tip. In the center, the lake reaches a depth of over 300 meters.
At the deepest part of the lake, there are, interestingly, sediments from the Rhone delta also. Those sediments wouldn’t be deposited there by normal river flow; instead it is thought they could have been moved by a tsunami wave. A rockfall near the delta of the lake would have caused an enormous wave, tens of meters high, to travel all the way across the lake. It hit the Rhone delta and washed sediments to the bottom of the basin as it sloshed.
Today, about a million people live on the shores of this lake. A similar rockfall today would potentially be an enormous disaster.
-JBB
Image credit:
https://twitter.com/AstroKomrade/status/915232111623266304
References:
www.vliz.be/imisdocs/publications/227430.pdf
http://go.nature.com/2hAfNo5
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