NASA has captured how an entire lake in Canada disappeared in just 15 days. Science has a disturbing explanation

Seen and unseen. In the spring of 2025 something happened in central Quebec: an entire lake disappeared in a matter of days. Lac Rouge, a 1.4 square kilometer body of water located in the Lac-Walker region of Sept-Rivières, a popular hunting and fishing area in the Waswanipi Cree First Nationdisappeared.

It did not dry out little by little as a result of a prolonged lack of rain as for example happens to Moroccoit was something abrupt and silent. What you see on these lines is the before and after photographed by the Landsat 9 satellite NASA from space with a margin of one year (June 2024 on the left and June 2025 on the right). That a lake disappears is scientifically interesting, as is the list of suspects: the shores have soft geology, the terrain has been suffering from forest fires for years, there is a lot of logging and also melting ice. Where is the trick.

What happened to the lake. The first sign was a destroyed road, as reported by local people who used it to move around the area: the access road was completely destroyed by water, as NASA explains. CBC echoes the subsequent investigationwhich revealed that the land surrounding the lake had collapsed and that Lac Rouge had been emptied. The lake had water on April 29, 2025 but was completely dry on May 14. I mean, It dried in just 15 days. At that time, the local administration released a statement alerting of the event.

But the water didn’t disappear, it just moved around. Instead of following its usual outlet channel, it opened a new channel to the northeast, crossing a 10-kilometer chain of lakes and wetlands until it reached Lac Doda. If you look at the after photo, you will see that it left a mark in the form of light brown sediments.

The explanation. Science explains this mechanism called outburst flooda flash overflow flood: a portion of the lake shore suddenly gave way and water quickly escaped through that gap instead of overflowing into existing river channels. He NASA Earth Observatory confirmed that it was the east bank that gave way, originating that new route. This phenomenon is relatively common in lakes of glacial origin with unstable ice barriers, but rare in a lake like Lac Rouge, whose barrier is made of soft sedimentary soil.

The underlying physics is common in basin hydrology: a coniferous forest absorbs between 20% and 50% of the rain it receives, according to this meta-study published in Nature. If there is no vegetation cover, the water reaches the soil directly, saturates it and weakens those banks. Hydrologist Younes Alila, from the University of British Columbia, summarizes it like this: Any ground disturbance (e.g. fire, logging or forestry) raises the water table and keeps it high for longer, increasing the risk of extreme flooding.

There is no Lake Ninio left, only Masibón. POT

Why is it important. Because Lac Rouge is not an isolated case: it is a warning. Climate change is making fires more frequent and melting more irregular, as the IPCC climate change expert group explains in his AR6while intensive logging continues to weaken soils. The combination of both factors in basins with soft geology favors the appearance of these poorly studied and difficult to anticipate events, as warned by a study on the boreal forest and climate change published in Springer Nature.

In this case, the direct blow is suffered by the indigenous communities. More than 600 communities depend on the Canadian boreal forest for their livelihood, according to the Boreal Conservation Foundationand events like this disappearance drastically alter the territory’s ecosystems and activities, such as hunting and fishing, from one day to the next.

The list of suspects. Considering these risk factors, Lac Rouge had all the cards:

• The fire. In 2019 and 2023, areas near the lake burned. The 2023 fire was Quebec’s worst in more than a century: it burned 4.5 million hectares, according to this study published in the Canadian Journal of Forest Research. The Guardian echoes from the Quebec Cree forestry department, which concludes that those fires eliminated much of the mature vegetation cover in the Lac Rouge basin, including that bank that gave way. Furthermore, the fires can reduce infiltration and increase runoff.
• Intensive logging. After the fires, logging companies obtained wood by scarifying the land to facilitate replanting, which worsened even more the hydrological degradation of the basin.
• The thaw of 2025. The winter of 2025 snowed more than normal and the thaw was rapid, generating a volume of water that those weak banks could not contain.

Natural or provoked? The Quebec government classified it as a natural event and did not investigate further. Their argument: Their own forestry studies say that if less than half of a watershed’s forest is damaged, the risk to rivers and lakes is minimal, as Sigma Earth collects. International experts and the Cree community do not accept it: these studies do not take into account that in Lac Rouge the damage accumulated in layers or that climate change makes all this happen with more frequency and intensity, according to the IPCC in its Sixth Assessment Report.

It was probably a combination of everything: soft soil and weak shoreline set the stage, rapid snowmelt was the spark, and decades of logging and fires made the system much more fragile than it otherwise would have been. As points out Sigma EarthLac Rouge can be a warning of what is to come if the way this territory is managed is not changed.

In Xataka | Chronicle of an announced collapse: the NASA map that shows how quickly Mexico City is sinking

In Xataka | The Earth’s seabed has always been a mystery: an amazing 3D map reveals it in unprecedented detail

Cover | POT