Lake Carnegie (Western Australia)


Lake Carnegie is a large ephemeral lake in the Shire of Wiluna in the Goldfields-Esperance region of Western Australia. The lake is named after David Carnegie, who explored much of inland Western Australia in the 1890s. A similar lake lies to its south east - Lake Wells.

Description

Lake Carnegie is predominately surrounded by desert environments.
It lies east of Wiluna and is at the southern edge of the Little Sandy Desert and south western border of the Gibson Desert. It is to the north-east of Leonora. It also lies to the north west of the Great Central Road and the Great Victoria Desert. It lies to the north of the main goldfields region of Western Australia.
The lake is approximately in length and approximately at its widest part. It has a total area of approximately, making it one of the largest lakes in Australia. The surface elevation is above mean sea-level.
It fills with water only during very rare periods of significant rainfall, such as during the huge 1900 floods and in numerous recent tropical wet seasons when the monsoon and tropical cyclones have been moved south by recent climate change. In dry years, it is reduced to a muddy marsh.
In 1973 Tropical Cyclone Kerry crossed the north-west coast and moved south-west as far as the northern goldfields. Nearby pastoral leases such as Windidda Station received falls of and Prenti Downs received over a four-day period. The run-off was enormous, causing widespread flooding, with the Lake overflowing, leaving the area between Carnegie and Wiluna being described as "one huge lake".
Water entering the lake, unlike in more easterly playas of the Australian arid zone, does not come from well-defined river channels since the soils of the region are so weathered – lacking tectonic or glacial activity since the Carboniferous ice ages – that sediment is completely absent and the terrain so flat that only the most unweatherable rocks remain on the surface and well-defined river channels cannot form, especially since the extreme age of the soils and consequent high rooting density of native flora limits runoff to an extreme extent.

Pastoral leases

The lake area is bounded by Windidda, Yelma, Wongawel, Niminga, Carnegie and Prenti Downs pastoral leases, otherwise known in Western Australia as stations.

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