What is it?<\/p>\n
Lac Rouge is a small lake, only about a 0.86 square miles (1.4 square kilometers) around. According to the European Southern Observatory,<\/a> it was used by the Cree First Nation based in the nearby community of Waswanipi for fishing, hunting, and trapping.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Where is it?<\/p>\n Lac Rouge is based in the the Lac-Walker region of Sept-Rivi\u00e8res in Quebec, Canada.<\/a><\/p>\n A photo from the LandSat satellite shows the drained Lac Rouge as a brown spot in the middle of the image. (Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory\/images by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.)Why is it amazing?<\/p>\n According to a statement <\/a>from the Cree First Nation of Waswanipi, the cause of the lake draining is still unknown. Possible theories suggest wildfires, recent rainfall or snowmelt may have been involved. Wildfires raged near the lake in both 2019 and 2023 which could have weakened the soil.<\/p>\n While the Landsat 9 satellite<\/a>, hovering in low-Earth orbit<\/a>, captured images before and after Lac Rouge was drained, the actual timing of the draining is not known, with experts guessing<\/a> it happened between April 29 and May 14, 2025.<\/p>\n According to ESO, the lake emptied by flowing to smaller ponds and rivers against its usual outflow path, where the water finally reached Lac Doda, around 6 miles (10 kilometers) away. Residents and visitors are worried that the draining will affect the local wildfire, such as moose and sturgeon.<\/p>\n As the Landsat 9 satellite was designed to study the Earth’s processes, its ability to capture events like this show how serious the effects of climate change <\/a>can be on our environment.<\/p>\n Want to learn more?<\/p>\n You can read more about Earth-scanning satellites <\/a>and other flooding events. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In May 2025, residents living around Lac Rouge discovered a washed-out road near the lake, triggering investigations that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37997,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-37996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37996\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/FgzRB4eo9uTgBX6SWzLMUZ.jpg\")
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