Crater Lake Essay -- essays research papers

Crater Lake   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Crater Lake is located at southwestern off Highway 62 in Oregon. It is Oregon?s only national park. It is the deepest lake in the United States and is the seventh deepest in the world. Crater Lake has an average diameter of 5.3 miles in length and is approximately 1,932 feet deep.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Crater Lake is a result of a volcanic explosion that happened about 7,000 years ago. A long time ago, the pacific oceanic plate was gradually moving under the pacific continental plate in the process of plate tectonics. The pressure shaped the land to move upward and create a line of mountains that are currently located on the Cascade Range. These lavas piled and cooled on top of each other resulting in mountains like Mazama and Hood. Mount Mazama was built by successive flows of both andesite and dacite lavas. Mount Mazama was a stratovolcano, which was about 12,000 feet high after series of ash, cinders, and pumice explosions built it upward. During it?s final eruption the magma chamber was emptying and the underlying support for the mountain was lost and the walls of the volcano began to collapse. In just a matter of days the top of the mountain was destroyed and left a caldera. A caldera is a word used by geologists to describe large basin-shaped volcanic depr essions. The destruction Mount Mazama was what marked the beginning of the formation of Crater Lake. The caldera was about 3,000 feet deep and over time, snow and rai...