Shallow end Why did Quebec's Lake Rouge vanish?

The sudden drainage has left experts and a community wondering if nature or human actions were responsible

- By Selena Ross

Manoel Dixon had just finished dinner one night last May when a phone dinged with a message.

Dixon, 26, was at his family's hunting camp near their northern Quebec home town of Waswanipi. They knew the fellow hunter who was messaging, but what he wrote didn't make sense.

"He said: 'Lake Rouge is gone,'" Dixon said.

Lake Rouge was a calm lake nearby with trout, sandy banks and a surface area of about 3 sq km. By "gone", they weren't sure what the man meant.

Dixon and his parents got their first glimpse the next day. All the water of Lake Rouge had, in fact, vanished. Eagles and crows began to circle over the mud and dead fish that remained.

He said his father "was quiet" at first, but then narrated a rush of memories - the lake's "really clear water", and how moose gravitated there.

A massive mud plain cutting northeast made it clear where the water had gone. It had travelled almost 10km overland into a bigger lake. Amazingly, no one had been hurt in this gigantic - was it a mudslide? A flood? Nobody was sure what to call it.

"I was devastated," said Chief Irene Neeposh of Waswanipi, an Indigenous Cree community. She called an emergency meeting, though she wasn't sure who to invite.

"Call me if you have a lake that drains, right?" she said. "Nobody knows what to do in this situation."

There is a name for this kind of sudden drainage of a lake - an outburst flood - but these have usually happened at glacial lakes, when the underlying ice cracks, or at human-made reservoirs when the dam fails.

Lake Rouge did not even empty through its normal drainage paths but cut a new outflow spot, an "absolutely amazing" case to see, said Diana Vieira, a scientist at the Joint Research Centre at the European Commission.