The Wildmoossee is an aperiodic mountain

lake A lake is an area filled with water, localized in a basin, surrounded by land, and distinct from any river or other outlet that serves to feed or drain the lake. Lakes lie on land and are not part of the ocean, although, like the much large ...

, 3 kilometres west of

Seefeld in Tirol Seefeld in Tirol is an old farming village, now a major tourist resort, in Innsbruck-Land District in the Austrian state of Tyrol with a local population of 3,312 (as of 1 January 2013). The village is located about northwest of Innsbruck on a pl ...

near the village of Wildmoos in the market borough of

Telfs Telfs is a market town in the district of Innsbruck-Land in the Austrian state of Tyrol, west of Innsbruck. It is the third largest municipality in Tyrol Tyrol (; historically the Tyrole; de-AT, Tirol ; it, Tirolo) is a historical regio ...

. The lake lies in the area of the water-soluble

main dolomite Main Dolomite (german: Hauptdolomit, hu, Fődolomit, it, Dolomia Principale) is a lithostratigraphic unit in the Alps of Europe. Formation was defined by K.W. Gümbel in 1857. Middle to Late Triassic sedimentary record in the Alpine realm is ...

of the

Seefeld Plateau The Seefeld Plateau (german: Seefelder Plateau) is a montane valley and basin landscape in the North Tyrolean Limestone Alps about 500 metres above the Inn valley in the Austrian state of Tyrol (Bundesland), Tyrol. The plateau covers the valley b ...

at a height of 1,316 metres.
Naturphänomen Wildmoossee und Lottensee - Tirol
', tirol.at As a result the ground underneath contains

chasm In geology, a rift is a linear zone where the lithosphere is being pulled apart and is an example of extensional tectonics. Typical rift features are a central linear downfaulted depression, called a graben, or more commonly a half-graben wi ...

s that reach up to the bottom of the lake. About every four years, so much

groundwater Groundwater is the water present beneath Earth's surface in rock and soil pore spaces and in the fractures of rock formations. About 30 percent of all readily available freshwater in the world is groundwater. A unit of rock or an unconsolidated ...

builds up as a result of

precipitation In meteorology, precipitation is any product of the condensation of atmospheric water vapor that falls under gravitational pull from clouds. The main forms of precipitation include drizzle, rain, sleet, snow, ice pellets, graupel and hail. ...

and snow meltwater that it is forced upwards out of the chasms under pressure and emerges spring-like at the surface, filling the lake basin. The highest water levels are usually reached in May. In late autumn, the lake empties itself again. This cycle can change due to the variable level of water resulting from variations in precipitation. The same karst landscape related phenomenon occurs at the Lottensee lake, 1.5 kilometres to the southwest.

Literature

* Peter Haimayer: ''Die Fremdenverkehrslandschaft in der Seefelder Senke''. Innsbrucker Geographische Studien. Vol. 2. Innsbruck, 1975, p. 139 ff.

References

Lakes of Tyrol (state) Mieming Range {{Tyrol-geo-stub