Geologists Just Found Out What Oregon’s Crater Lake Actually Is

Crater Lake sits in a pit six miles wide in the southern Oregon Cascades, holding the deepest and clearest water in the United States. No river feeds it. No river drains it — yet it loses two million gallons an hour, and the level never drops. The name on the sign says crater; the United States Geological Survey does not. What sonar found on the floor in the year 2000, and what a dead tree has been doing out there for 450 years, is far stranger than the postcard version.