13,000
YEARS Age of Lake Lacawac. The 52-acre glacial lake is part of the Lacawac Sanctuary in northeastern Pennsylvania.

Imagine a pristine, glacial lake serving as a unique living laboratory for studying water quality and climate change. Researchers at Drexel and its Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University will have access to such a 13,000-year-old lake and more thanks to a recent agreement with the Lacawac Sanctuary Foundation to form an environmental research and education consortium at Lacawac Sanctuary in the Pocono Mountains.

The agreement includes plans to construct a new research laboratory at Lake Lacawac.

The sanctuary is a 545-acre nature preserve, ecological field research station and public environmental education facility in Wayne County that boasts over a mile of undisturbed shoreline on Lake Wallenpaupack, eastern Pennsylvania’s largest recreational lake. Preservation and research within Lake Lacawac and its surrounding watershed is critical because the upper Delaware River watershed serves more than 15 million people in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York and Delaware.