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Bloomfield Blossoms: p. 024-025

Smith, Kay, 1925-

Bloomfield Township Public Library

Sodon Lake (Oakland County, Mich.)

Bloomfield Township (Mich.)

Newcombe, Curtis L.

GB01a014

part of 'Bloomfield Blossoms' by Kay Smith

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BEAUTY AND MYSTERY IN STILL WATERS Sodon Lake between Long Lake and Lone Pine Roads near Franklin looks so peaceful and pleasant on an autumn day. The diving board suggests the swimming and boating which make it such a pleasant place to be in summer. How sinister that it has a darker side, a deep secret vault where prehistoric mysteries are hidden. Words like dyothermic and meromictic apply to it. Sheltered from the wind, and just 5.7 acres in surface area, it is still 60 feet deep, and surface winds and variations of temperature don't affect that lower cavern where is stored the evidence of vegetation of each interim between glacial periods. The water at the lower level does not mix with the upper water, making the lake a rare phenomenon. It was this peculiar characteristic which prompted Dr. Curtis L. Newcombe, of Cranbrook Institute of Science, who tested the secrets of the little lake in the 1940s, to suggest before the American Association for the Advance- ment of Science that Sodon Lake be used as a depository for nuclear waste. The suggestion was not accepted. Sodon is one of 32 lakes and ponds in the original Township area, most left as the glaciers retreated, some man-made or at least deepened to drain off water.