As far as I know quarry lakes are created over time as rainwater fills the quarry over years. What keeps an open quarry from getting filled the same way when it rains?
Please tell me if the flair is wrong, I estimated this one to be the closest fitting.
In: 266
Active quarries have pumps to help them keep dry. In addition to the pumps a lot of the water is soaked up by the masses being brought out of the quarry. But even abandoned quarries does not always fill with water. Some places the bedrock is porous enough due to cracks that the water can drain through the bedrock and out towards the ocean faster then the quarry can fill up.
Culverts, pumps, geo-engineering, gravity. The real answer is maintenance. There are a bunch of systems that can keep a quarry dry, but if nobody is getting paid to maintain them they’re gonna get filled with muck and beaver dams and eventually you maybe get a superfund site, or a fence, or most likely nobody gives a shit and the thing sits for years, providing a place for cliche high school drama for years to come.
Occasionally people stick boats on the thing and then you 10x some property values, that’s legit but not common. Mostly you 10x the property value for mosquitos until somebody tosses a few gold fish in, then end up with a carp pond.
There’s a drain.
Water goes in, but only rises if it goes in faster than it drains out. A quarry that doesn’t fill simply leaks water faster than it can fill — through holes and cracks in the rock.
I feel like most people here are talking about rainwater filling a quarry. Often, it really is about the existing groundwater table “filling” the quarry, not precipitation. Think of it more like digging a hole in sand near the water at the beach. If you dig far enough down, you encounter water. The water didn’t run in from the top, or fall in from rain, it was already there. Now, you can use a bucket to quickly scoop out the water faster than it seeps back in. This is basically what is happening at a quarry. The pumps remove the water that is seeping in from the surrounding rock faster than it seeps in. The difference between the sand at the beach and the rock at the quarry is that water typically travels through loose sand much faster. However, if you stop pumping or managing the seeping water all together, the water level will slowly rise until it’s equal to the surrounding water table.
If drainage is faster than accumulation of water from rainfall or streams, then a lake will not form.
At least some of that drainage will likely take the form of streams above ground itself, but it can also drain through the Earth directly If there are places where the rock layer is not complete or the rock is very porous.