Lake Nicaragua Totally Explained

Everything about Lake Nicaragua totally explained

Lake Nicaragua or Cocibolca or Granada (Lago Cocibolca, Mar Dulce, Gran Lago, Gran Lago Dulce, or Lago de Granada) is a vast freshwater lake in Nicaragua of tectonic origin. With an area of 8 264 km², it's the largest lake in Central America, the 21st largest lake in the world (by area) and only slightly smaller than Lake Titicaca. With an elevation of 32 m (105 ft) above sea level, the lake reaches a depth of 26 m (84 ft). It is intermittently joined by the Tipitapa River to Lake Managua.
The lake is connected to the Caribbean Sea by the San Juan River, historically making the lakeside city of Granada, Nicaragua an Atlantic port although it's closer to the Pacific. The lake has a history of Caribbean pirates which assaulted nearby Granada on three occasions.. Despite draining into the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean is near enough to be seen from the mountains of Ometepe (an island in the lake).
Before construction of the Panama Canal, a stagecoach line owned by Cornelius Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit Company connected the lake with the Pacific across the low hills of the narrow Isthmus of Rivas. Plans were made to take advantage of this route to build an interoceanic canal, the Nicaragua Canal, but the Panama Canal was built instead. In order to quell competition with the Panama Canal, the U.S. secured all rights to a canal along this route in the Bryan-Chamorro Treaty of 1916. However, the idea of another canal in Nicaragua still periodically resurfaces. Ecocanal is one of these projects.

Lake ecology

Lake Nicaragua, despite being a freshwater lake, has swordfish, tarpon, and sharks. Initially, scientists thought the sharks in the lake belonged to an endemic species, the Lake Nicaragua Shark (Carcharhinus nicaraguensis). In 1961, following comparisons of specimens, the Lake Nicaragua Shark was synonymized with the widespread Bull shark (C. leucas), a species also known for entering freshwater elsewhere around the world. It had been presumed that the sharks were trapped within the lake, but this was found to be mistake in the late 1960s, when it was discovered that they were able to jump along the rapids of the San Juan River (which connects Lake Nicaragua and the Caribbean Sea), almost like salmon. As evidence of these movements, bull sharks tagged inside the lake have later been caught in the open ocean (and vice versa), with some taking as little as 7-11 days to complete the journey. A non-native cichlid, a Tilapia, is used widely in aquaculture within the lake. Owing to the large amount of waste they produce, and the potential risk of introducing diseases to which the native fishes have no resistance, they potentially are a serious threat to the lake's ecosystem.
   Nicaraguans call the Lake Lago Cocibolca or Mar Dulce (literally, Sweet Sea; in Spanish, freshwater is agua dulce). The lake has sizeable waves driven by the easterly winds blowing west to the Pacific Ocean and can be sporadic and choppy. The lake holds Ometepe and Zapatera which are both volcanic islands, as well as the archipelago of the Solentiname Islands. The lake has a reputation for periodically having powerful, unnavigable storms.
   In the past 37 years, considerable concern has been expressed about the ecological condition of Lake Nicaragua. In 1981 the Nicaraguan Institute of Natural Resources and the Environment (IRENA) conducted an environmental assessment study and found that half of the water sources sampled were seriously polluted by sewage. It was found that 32 tons (70,000 pounds) of raw sewage was being released into Lake Nicaragua daily. Industry located along the lake's shore had been dumping effluent for an extended period of time. Pennwalt Chemical Corporation was found to be the worst polluter. Nicaragua's economic situation has hampered the building of treatment facilities nationwide (see: Water supply and sanitation in Nicaragua).

Further Information

Get more info on 'Lake Nicaragua'.

External Link Exchanges

Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:

<a href="http://lake_nicaragua.totallyexplained.com">Lake Nicaragua Totally Explained</a>

Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned.