how come the ground under lakes and rivers don’t drink up all the water but plain surface ground drinks up everything eventually?
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The ground is already full of water. There is a water table beneath your feet, where the ground is full of water. If you’re below this level, water usually comes out of the ground and forms a puddle or eventually a stream. Above it, and the ground will absorb water.
Saturation.
The ground underneath the water already has “as much as it can take” … and the residual water becomes a standing water source.
It’s the composition of the soil that allows for infiltration of water. The particle size of sandy soils is larger than that of clays and silts. The voids created by these larger particles allow water room to travel. Clay and silt have much smaller particles and greater cohesion so it becomes a solid layer blocking the water.
I’m no expert but I think some river grounds are covered in clay which doesnt absorb water endlessly
The ground can soap up a lot of water, but not an unlimited amount of water. In some places the ground gets full so the water has to sit on top of the ground. That’s what lakes and rivers are.
The lake looks like a bowl, but it’s actually a bowl-shaped dent in a heavy sponge sitting in a much larger basin.
Water soaks into the ground (a heavy sponge) until it hits rock that it can’t go around (the basin). The basin keeps water in the sponge from going through the bottom of the sponge. As more water is added, the sponge (ground) fills with more water. If there’s a lower-lying area (a dent in the sponge) the water appears as a lake (puddle) surrounded by ground (sponge about puddle-level).
Your question is the answer.
Plain surface ground drinks up all the water it can. When it stops being able to drink up more water, lakes and rivers form.
I want to preface this with im not a geologist.
My understanding is that there is less porous rock beneath the lake for the water to drain into, combined with the porous rock that is beneath the lake already being saturated with water, then factor in rainfall, and water draining down from hills etc. The water is replenished faster than it can drain.
It does. Want proof? Go about 20 feet from the shore and dig down. You will hit water at the same level as the nearby lake. Lakes aren’t usually where water sits on top because it doesn’t sink in, it is where water has sunk in for so long, it is filled up with water. No room for more. The lake is the overflow. It would sink in if it could, and it sort of does. Have to push the water already there to somewhere else first, or at the same time, is all. All open space down there is filled with water.
Really only a question of how far down you have to go to hit the water table, the depth where all open space is filled with water. Lakes and rivers are where the water table rises above the ground.
Until that deep (about 12 km deep) borehole was made in Russia a few decades ago, people argued about how deep water actually existed in the rock. Well, turns out there is room for water as deep as we can go. Maybe not a lot of space for it, but it is there just the same. All the way from down there until up here at the surface. Just at some point down there it is as vapor, as gas (no longer liquid), because it is very hot.
Lakes form when the water table underneath them is saturated and cannot absorb any more water so any water stays on the surface. In most places the water table is not saturated to ground level, and so the rain water is able to soak in. This absorption takes a lot of time though, which is why it’s possible to have floods during a drought — the ground cannot soak up a suddenly huge amount of water.
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