Devil's Lake
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Who would have thought that docile landscape of North Dakota would spawn a creature worthy of a horror movie? This creature, this monster is eating up farmland, trees, parks, and houses. It's been on the move for 60 years, and it doesn't look like it's ever going to stop. Appropriately, the villain is called Devil's Lake. Hi I'm Dave Thurlow for the Weather Notebook.

Devil's Lake is part of the land scooped out by glaciers 12,000 years ago after the last ice age. It's a giant version of a prairie pothole. The land around Devils Lake is like a shallow bowl, so there's no way for water to escape, except by evaporation. Back in 1940, after the drought of the Dust Bowl, Devil's Lake was just two feet deep. But since then, rainfall has gone up and the lake has grown. In the last seven years, it's tripled in size to cover about 200 square miles, swallowing up a shore side state park in 1995.

What's heartrending for the people around Devils Lake is watching their homelands disappear. The town of Church's Ferry is virtually abandoned. The federal government paid $3.5 million to move about 100 people from the town, and now only a handful of folks are left. The government's also looking at some technological fixes. One idea is a channel that would drain water into the Cheyenne River. The problem is that this water would flow on to Canada, and it could cause trouble by bringing unfamiliar organisms into the Hudson Bay ecosystem. So more research has to be done before the channel is built.

Meanwhile, the people around Devils Lake watch the water rise and hope that technology, or the climate, can soon come to the rescue.

I'm Dave Thurlow for the Weather Notebook, which is supported by Subaru, the beauty of all-wheel drive.