One of the things I have really enjoyed about being a pond-meister is the variety of things I have observed I would never have known about. Thanks to all of you for being as interested as I am in the �why� of what we see.
Eric, your post brings to mind the lack of mixing I sometimes see in my pond. In the winter, water flowing off the mountain (only in Alabama and England would the 1,200 foot high ridge which is the back edge of my property and which serves as my watershed be mapped as a mountain) has a peculiar milky appearance. It doesn't look muddy, but like water with a little milk of magnesia in it. (For those too young to have experienced the joys of milk of magnesia, think of water shaken with corn starch or even some flour.) The boundary between this water and the rest of the pond is often very sharp--not straight, but sharp, and the difference can last many hours. I can understand currents from river tributaries not mixing well for a while, but why should such a knife-edge boundary, several hundred feet in length, occur in a pond? Temperature difference doesn�t seem to be a reasonable explanation, and the wet-weather stream from which the water comes is relatively small in relation to the boundary zone which is produced.
Lou
