If you have ever worried that we have solved all the
mysteries of nature, fear not. Minnesota’s Devil’s Kettle Falls has been perplexing
hikers and geologists for generations. The Devil's Kettle is a mystifying
geological wonder situated inside Judge C. R. Magney State Park in Minnesota,
in USA, just off the North Shore of Lake Superior. The Brule River makes its
way through the park; it drops 800 feet in elevation and makes plentiful
waterfalls in the process.
One of these waterfalls is quite distinct. Approximately 2.4
km before the river empties into Lake Superior; it gets split in two by a rocky
outcrop. The eastern part drops 50 feet below and continues towards Lake
Superior. The western part falls 10 feet into a massive pothole, which is
called the “Devil's Kettle” and disappears. No one knows where the water goes.
It is thought there must be an exit point somewhere underneath Lake Superior,
but it has never been located. From the last several years, investigators have
dropped brightly colored dyes, ping pong balls, and many other things into the
Devil's Kettle.
Surprisingly none of them have ever been found. One philosophy
is that the river flows along a subversive fault and comes out somewhere under
Lake Superior. This is dubious, because for this to happen, the fault would
have to be exactly oriented towards the lake, and would have to be big enough
to let the flow of half the river. Even if such a fault is real, it would have probably
been clogged over the years as rocks, sand, logs and other materials fell into
the kettle. Besides, there is no sign of such a fault in the area. One more
theory is found when millions of years ago a lava tube formed when the rocks
first solidified.
The issue with this theory is that the rock at Devil’s Kettle
waterfalls is rhyolite, and lava tubes never form in rhyolite. Lava tubes form
in basalt flowing down the slopes of volcanoes, and the adjacent basalt layer
to Devil’s Kettle is situated much too far underground to be any kind of factor
in the mystery. The existence of a big underground cave is also ruled out
because underground caves form in limestone rock, and there is no limestone in
the area. The mystery is compounded by the fact no floating debris suddenly
appearing at one spot offshore in Lake Superior has ever been reported.
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