Plitvice Jezere

aerial, originally uploaded by anasophia.

We went to Plitvice jezere this weekend. It is un-freaking believably beautiful. This is where my grandma's family was from; a little village called Ljeskovac. It still exists, but it's inside the national park, about a 3 km walk from the end of the bus line. I was all ready to go, but Mirijana and Kojo said, "drugi put!"

The lakes are truly an amazing natural phenomenon. Because the natural bedrock of the area is limestone, there is a large amount of calcium dissolved in the water. In areas where there is a lot of aeration in the water, mosses flourish and trap the dissolved calcium, forming a rock called travertine. Over many years this forms a barrier, and a lake is formed. Travertine builds up at a rate of about 1-3 cm per year in the Plitvice lakes. Carbon dating has shown that these lakes only started forming about 4,000 years ago. (I say "these lakes" because there is evidence that the lake-forming process also happened 40,000 years ago; the travertine of those lakes was broken down during the ice age and started re-forming 4,000 years ago).

This biotic interaction means that the depth and shape of the lakes is constantly changing. From 1855 to 1958 the lakes rose 1-3 meters!