Only two architects predict that a full 18-hole course made of artificial turf will be built sometime in the next 10 years. Most feel the tremendous cost of synthetic materials would not be recouped by savings in water and chemicals because of the short shelf life of synthetics.
If constructing buildings, bridges and tunnels may be something obvious, building artificial lakes is not so much so. The origin of these water surfaces, born in areas previously occupied by pastures, forests or little villages, has many reasons. The majority of artificial lakes were built to generate electricity.
Lake Kariba is the world's largest artificial lake according to volume. Located between Zambia and Zimbabwe it includes 180 km 3 of water on an area of 5,500 km2. The lake took shape after a double-arched concrete dam was built on the Zambezi River, the first project to be funded by the World Bank in the African continent.
Most golf courses have a maintenance crew that mows and rolls greens. Using artificial turf would eliminate over half of them and you could sell and/or eliminate all of the huge equipment. The only other problem would be learning how it would react.
Golf balls are retrieved from water hazards on courses all over the world, and while the water depth is rarely more than 40 feet -- and usually less than half that -- divers can easily become disoriented or overly weighted down by the reclaimed balls and equipment.
Many golf courses use their ponds as water retention devices that the irrigation system pulls from nightly. If it weren't for the ponds, the water bill of a single golf course could easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of 12 short months.
The main way that water gets into reservoirs and man-made lakes is from the rivers and streams that were dammed to create them. Like man-made reservoirs and lakes, natural lakes may also be replenished by rivers and streams. Natural lakes have another advantage, when it come to holding their water.
While lake flooding is very rare because they are either regulated by man-made dams or kept at consistent levels by the water cycle, lakes have been known to flood on occasion because of heavy rainfall or climate change.
A dredge for golf course ponds is the basis for dredging. The machine works by pumping the water and sludge out through a submersible pump and into a series of bladder bags or dewatering tubes. These bags have minuscule holes, which let the water escape but keep the muck inside.
Crewmembers stand on the ground at opposite ends of the pond and guide the roller by pulling on a wire connected to it. If the roller gets stuck in mud or rocks, one of the crewmembers goes underwater to free it. After they have combed the pond, crewmembers pull the roller to the ground and pop out the golf balls.
It takes an average of one to three years from conception to completion of a man-made lake, Glenn explained. There are many variables, but it costs $30,000 to $50,000 an acre to build a 30-acre lake, excluding land and excavation costs.
Man-made lakes are usually constructed by using a dam to divert a portion of a river to store the water within a reservoir. During seasonal changes, water runoff and precipitation add to the reservoir, which helps in the prevention of evaporation.
Usually, these ruins end up back below the surface of the lake when the worst of the drought passes. But sometimes lakes dry up altogether, whether because they're man-made lakes that are drained on purpose or because people have mismanaged them so badly that they shrink into nothing.
Simply speaking, natural lakes are defined as waterbodies without evidence of a dam or where available information indicated the lake was natural even if a dam exists to augment the depth of the lake. Manmade reservoirs are defined as waterbodies that are constructed.
So, yes, most of Texas' “lakes” are, in fact, reservoirs, but there are still a few natural lakes in the state. Caddo Lake, on the border of Texas and Louisiana, is both a natural reservoir and man made lake. Hundreds of years ago, Caddo Lake was formed due to the Red River being plugged up by debris.
Man-made lakes are better for providing consistent conditions than natural features that may change from season to season. Some of the country's largest man-made lakes, such as Nevada's Lake Mead, are primarily designed to supply drinking water for millions of people.
A UNESCO World Heritage Site, Lake Baikal in Russia is the deepest lake in the world. At 25 million years old, it is also the oldest lake in the world. Half of its 60 native fish species and a freshwater seal species are endemic to this lake, meaning they cannot be found anywhere else.
Image credit: Christian Peters/Shutterstock. O'Higgins-San Martin Lake at 2,742 feet is the fifth deepest lake in the world, and its territory in Patagonia is shared by Chile and Argentina. Its name comes from two independence movement liberators from Chile.
Vostok Lake in Antarctica is, at 3,300 feet, the fourth deepest lake in the world. It was named after the Russian Vostok Station, which is close to it. It holds around 1,300 cubic miles of freshwater, 1,600 feet under the ice surface.
Lake Matano - 590 m/1,936 ft. Lake Matano. Image credit: Muailah Sahul/Shutterstock.com. The world's tenth deepest lake by maximum depth, Lake Matano, is located in South Sulawesi, Indonesia. It is the country's deepest lake as well as the world's deepest lake by maximum depth that is located on an island.
Image credit: Katvic/Shutterstock. The deepest lake in the world by both maximum depth and mean depth is Lake Baikal in Russia. It contains 20% of the Earth's freshwater. Vostok Lake in Antarctica is the fourth deepest lake in the world by maximum depth and third deepest by mean depth.
Lake Tanganyika is the second deepest lake in the world, on top of being the world’s longest lake, spanning four countries: Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi, and Zambia. It holds around 18% of the world’s freshwater which is equal to close to 4,500 cubic miles of water.
A lake affects the temperature of its surrounding areas such as lowering the air temperature during the day while at night, air temperature may go up. Although lakes provide livelihood and food for the people living around it, some dangers are present when landslides and earthquakes cause the mixing of the benthic water to release carbon dioxide to the surface air. The released carbon dioxide could potentially flow into human inhabited regions and cause mass asphyxiation. This happened at Lake Nyos in Cameroon in 1986, when a landslide created a cloud of CO 2, suffocating 1,746 people and over 3,000 livestock.