Hooker Lake is a
proglacial lake that started to form in the late 1970s by the recent retreat of the
Hooker Glacier. It is in the Hooker Valley, in the
Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park in
New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...
's
South Island
The South Island, also officially named , is the larger of the two major islands of New Zealand in surface area, the other being the smaller but more populous North Island. It is bordered to the north by Cook Strait, to the west by the Tasman ...
, just south of
Aoraki / Mount Cook.
Etymology
The geographic Hooker items were named by the
Canterbury provincial geologist,
Julius von Haast, after British botanist
William Jackson Hooker
Sir William Jackson Hooker (6 July 178512 August 1865) was an English botanist and botanical illustrator, who became the first director of Kew when in 1841 it was recommended to be placed under state ownership as a botanic garden. At Kew he ...
.
Description
Hooker Lake's length has doubled between 1990 and 2013 from 1.2 kilometres to 2.3 kilometres, the glacier retreating by over per year. It is expected to grow by another as Hooker Glacier retreats further up the valley until the glacier's retreat will have reached the point where the glacier bed is higher than the lake's water level.
The lake is one of the most accessible glacier lakes and can be reached year-round from the White Horse Hill camp ground near
Mount Cook Village
Aoraki / Mount Cook, often referred to as Mount Cook Village, is located within New Zealand's Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park at the end of , only south of the summit of the country's highest mountain, also called Aoraki/Mount Cook, in the So ...
via the well-formed
Hooker Valley Track
The Hooker Valley Track is the most popular short walking track within the Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park in New Zealand. At only length and gaining only about in height, the well formed track can be walked by tourists with a wide range of ...
. The track ends at a lookout point at the lake's shore, with a short path providing easy access to the shore.
In the warmer months icebergs can typically be seen floating in the water. The icebergs slowly drift from the terminus of the glacier at the northern end of the lake until close to the shore. The lake's water temperature is typically lower than .
In winter, the lake freezes over,
and at the coldest time of the year it can be safe to walk onto the ice.
Hooker Lake drains into Hooker River, its glacial waters blueish light grey due to the suspended glacial
rock flour
Rock flour, or glacial flour, consists of fine-grained, silt-sized particles of rock, generated by mechanical grinding of bedrock by glacial erosion or by artificial grinding to a similar size. Because the material is very small, it becomes suspe ...
.
No boats tour the lake, but they do the large, nearby
Tasman Lake
Tasman Lake is a proglacial lake formed by the recent retreat of the Tasman Glacier in New Zealand's South Island.
In the early 1970s, there were several small meltwater ponds on the Tasman Glacier. By 1990, these ponds had merged into Tasman L ...
.
See also
*
Climate change in New Zealand
References
{{Reflist
Lakes of Canterbury, New Zealand
Proglacial lakes
Aoraki / Mount Cook National Park