I used to know what it was called, but I'm blanking on it. Grüner See is an example of if. There is one in Michigan too that a woman I used to know showed me pictures of it and she used the correct term for those kinds of lakes. basically, its a meadow or a valley, and when it gets warm, it floods and becomes a lake. When the water drains, its a meadow/valley again. when I typed in "disappearing lake" in the search, i literally came up with a place called Disappearing Lake in Washington. Its not a turlough, either...
hmmm... those are not the term the lady used for it... but after googling, the definition is pretty much the same as she explained it to me. So i'll go with one of those! Thank you!
Ahhhh! I found her blog post about it! It was a "vernal pond". Hmmm, doesnt sound as whimsical as i remembered.
They call it a "water meadow" in the UK. But in this case it's not really the lake that disappears, it's the grass. There's a famous one called Port Meadow along the Thames River (aka the Isis) on the outskirts of the city of Oxford. Most of the time it's full of cows and frequented by students and townies taking leisurely walks. But when the Isis floods, as it does regularly in wet winters and springs, it's a veritable wave-capped lake. A few years back an idiot of a developer tried to convince the town council to sell Port Meadow to him to pave it over and build blocks of low-rise flats. Totally crazy, that would have been. Where would all the water go? Happily, the council refused.
In my part of Texas, we have a lot of playa lakes aka “buffalo wallers” that show those characteristics.
This is an interesting question, and one I'd like to see the definitive answer to. I don't have time to chase it up at the moment, but this might get you started: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood-meadow
Heh, this is interesting. I have a Nauyucit Swamp on my map (get it? "Now you see it"? Or is it not as obvious as I think? lol) that comes and goes as the river it surrounds floods. It doesn't play any part in my story yet, but I have two books left to write and I intend to bring it in sometime haha. So this info is good to know.
