[Captain Rhino]

Let's do some math here.

Pravda (Russian for "truth") says the lake contained a million cubic meters of water.

To give the bloggers some idea of how much volume that much water is, lets assume that the lake is uniformly 100 meters wide (wider than a US football field is long) and 30 meters deep (over 90 feet deep). The length of our example lake is then approximately 334 meters (nearly 1100 feet) long!

That would be a pretty big hole. You would be able to put a modern aircraft carrier up to its flight deck inside. Since lakes are not uniformly deep or wide, the actual hole in the ground should be even larger.

I have yet to see a picture associated with this story (including the Pravda article pictures posted) depicting anything approaching this size.

Of course, this skepticism concerning the veracity of the facts in this story IN NO WAY absolves President Bush of his responsibility for having caused the problem!

[EnjoyingLife]

Perhaps the following articles can yield a few more precious details that will be helpful in this interesting mystery:

White Lake in Russia just disappears, pulled into underground channel
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.lake29may29,1,5548950.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.lake29may29,1,1393916,print.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines

Lake Pulls a Disappearing Act in Russia
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-lake27may27,0,5483472.story?coll=la-home-headlines
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-lake27may27,0,3373752,print.story?coll=la-home-headlines