Footage From Lake Jackson Reveals The 28-Foot Hole That Swallowed An Entire Florida Lake

Ajouté : 2026-05-18

[00:00:00]A 4,000 acre lake near Tallahassee, Florida, just disappeared into a single 28 foot hole. Not flooded, not polluted, drained in 5 months. And where the water went is stranger than the fact that it left.

[00:00:17]Lake Jackson sits 10 minutes from downtown Tallahassee, just off Interstate 10. At full pool, it covers 6.2 square miles. No rivers feed it. No outlets carry water away. It is a closed carsted basin, a bowl carved into dissolved Florida limestone where rain collects and stays or used to stay.

[00:00:40]Right now, Lake Jackson is cracked mud and stranded lily pads. Boat ramps end in dry sediment.

[00:00:48]A bobcat was photographed crossing what was a launch dock 2 months ago.

[00:00:52]On May 4th, two men climbed into the sinkhole at the bottom of the dry lake bed to hunt for fossils, standing on rocks that on any normal year of the last quarter century would be under more than 20 ft of water.

[00:01:06]Every one of Florida's five water management districts is now under a simultaneous shortage order. The Northwest Florida Water Management District just issued only its third water shortage warning in 26 years. The state itself is running a water deficit.

[00:01:24]And the 12 billion gallons that drained from Lake Jackson are not sitting in the ground doing nothing. They are moving underground toward something. But here is what the headlines don't show.

[00:01:37]In 2018, Dr. Shawn McGlin of McGlin Laboratories poured tracer dye into Porter's sink, the sink hole on the lake's southern floor that connects to the Florida aquifer below. He wanted to know where the water actually goes when a lake disappears into the ground. 35 days later, the die appeared at Wula Spring, one of the largest first magnitude springs on Earth, 19 m to the south, in the dark through limestone for 5 weeks at an average speed of 0.87 87 km per day. Lake Jackson's water travels underground through the Florida aquifer, resurfaces 19 m away, and flows into a spring system that provides drinking water to the entire Tallahassee metropolitan area, nearly 400,000 people. That aquifer is already on Florida's impaired waters list.

[00:02:35]Nitrate levels from agricultural runoff have degraded its quality for years. And now it is receiving 12 billion gallons from a closed lake basin that has been accumulating storm runoff, fertilizer drainage, and lake bed sediment since the 1950s. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection has not published a contamination advisory. The water shortage order does not address what arrives at Wacola Spring in 5 weeks. And here is what made it worse.

[00:03:06]This is not a one-time event. It has happened before. The lake has a Muscogi name, Oki Heapkkey. It means disappearing waters. The people who named it had already watched it drain.

[00:03:20]What is different about 2025 is not that the lake disappeared. It is how often it is disappearing now and what that acceleration is telling us about the ground beneath the most populated part of North Florida.

[00:03:35]For at least two centuries, Lake Jackson drained roughly once every 20 years. There were five documented events across 150 years. Slow, predictable, geological, a carsted lake doing what carsted lakes do. Then the interval collapsed. Since the late 1990s, the lake has drained six times in 26 years. A cycle that held at two decades for two centuries is now running every few years. Nobody in state government has formally explained why.

[00:04:11]Harley means is the state geologist of Florida with the Florida Geological Survey. He climbed into Porter Sync himself during the 1999 draw down the first drain in the modern acceleration.

[00:04:24]He describes Lake Jackson as a checking account.

[00:04:28]When rainfall deposits exceed what the lake loses to evaporation, seepage and the sinkhole drain, the account stays positive and the lake holds. When deposits stop, the account drains.

[00:04:43]Here is what that analogy hides. The checking account metaphor works fine in a normal drought year, but Florida Geological Survey data shows the account is being drawn down faster than deposits can replace it. The aquafer pressure below Lake Jackson drops during drought.

[00:05:01]When it drops far enough, the sediment plug at Porter Sink loses the upward pressure that keeps it sealed and the lake drains. The 2025 drought is the worst in Tallahassee's recorded history, which means the aquafer pressure has dropped further than at any point in the monitoring record, faster than any previous cycle has required it to recover. The 2025 drain is colliding with the worst drought in Tallahassy's recorded history. The National Weather Service has placed the region in extreme drought. Dr. McGlin said the 1 to 3 ines of rain forecast this week is almost certainly not enough to keep the sinkhole submerged. Lake Jackson needs consistent 3 to 6 in storms. Half-in showers, he said, evaporate before the next one arrives. Without a major rain event, the basin stays exposed and it is still not over. Quarter sink does not stay open forever. Sediment will eventually plug it again the same way it has plugged itself after every drain in the lakes's documented history, but nobody can say when. In 1999, it took 2 years for the lake to refill. In 2012, rainfall returned faster. In 2025, the aquafer below the lake is already under more demand than at any point in the monitoring record. On the evening of November 30th, 2025, Rob Diaz devel at sunset.

[00:06:36]He is the ecology producer at WFSU public media and had been monitoring the drought's effects on the region for months. He was not expecting what he found. The lake was draining in real time. Water was cascading into Porter sink like a bathtub emptying. He photographed it. The images showed a vortex of surface water spiraling into the sinkhole opening, the visible signal that the plug had failed and the lake had committed to going underground.

[00:07:09]By the time he published his account, the process was already irreversible for that cycle.

[00:07:17]Within 48 hours, 28 ft of sinkhole was visible at the bottom of a basin that had been a lake the week before. At Fox Drive landing on the lakes's western shore, the boat ramp now ends in mud.

[00:07:32]Local birders who used to track water foul across open water now track shore birds picking through cracked sediment.

[00:07:39]Fish populations, including bluegill, largemouth bass, and gar have compressed into the few remaining deep pockets at Church Cove and McInness Arm. 12 mi south at Cascade Lake near Tallahassee International Airport, Cypress trees that were submerged a year ago now stand exposed 10 ft up their trunks, ringed by a pale band of bark where the water line used to sit. Chris Paxton, a biologist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, said the eventual refill will benefit the lakes's ecology. Karstst drains reset sediment and can restore habitat quality when the water returns. He is right. What he did not say is when that refill arrives or what the aquafer looks like when it does. The Atlantic hurricane season opens June 1st. A single tropical system could refill Lake Jackson in days.

[00:08:36]Without one, the basin stays exposed through the summer with the sinkhole open at the bottom, fossils visible in the exposed limestone, and the Florida aquifer below absorbing whatever the lake delivers next. A lake that used to disappear once every 20 years has now disappeared six times in 26 years. The drought driving the 2025 event is the worst in Tallahassy's recorded history.

[00:09:02]And 12 billion gallons of lake water is moving right now through a karst system that supplies drinking water to 400,000 people. Three questions sit in the geological record with no official answer. If a lake that drained once every 20 years is now draining every few years and the aquifer below it is already under record demand, at what point does Lake Jackson stop being a lake that occasionally disappears and become a basin that occasionally fills?

[00:09:37]If 12 billion gallons carrying decades of lake bed accumulation and agricultural runoff is traveling 19 miles underground to emerge at a spring already listed as impaired. What does the water quality data look like at Wacola Spring in 35 days? And who is measuring it?

[00:09:56]And if every water management district in Florida is simultaneously under shortage orders during the worst drought in Tallahassy's recorded history, what happens to the next drought cycle in a carsted aquifer that is already being drawn down faster than the monitoring record has ever shown?

[00:10:16]The water that filled Lake Jackson on Thanksgiving morning is right now somewhere beneath the pine flats between Tallahassee and Wakula.

[00:10:24]Moving at less than 1 kilometer a day through limestone in the dark toward the surface, Porter Sink is still open. The aquifer is still receiving it. And the next 40,000 acre feet of Lake Jackson is already on its way to Wula Spring.