Bubble

Question

Last month we walked along a lake. Sometimes bubbles could be seen in the water. Is it possible to say: 'At some places along the lake, gasses bubbling up out of the water could be seen'?

Deadrat · Accepted Answer

Your sentence is grammatically well formed. I see two problems. The first is the passive voice at the end of the sentence. "Could be seen" has an unfortunate attraction to "water." You could say "gasses could be seen bubbling up out of the water." This brings me to the second problem: do you mean to say you saw the gasses or the bubbles? If you saw the gasses, I hope you ran away. Many visible gasses, like Chlorine and Nitrogen dioxide, are highly toxic.

If you want to keep the emphasis on the bubbles, you could say, "bubbles could be seen rising out of the water." Only gas makes bubbles in water, so you don't need to say "bubbles of gas." If the emphasis doesn't matter, transpose to the active voice, "we could see bubbles rising out of the water." (I've left out "up" because that's the only direction that things rise, but that's a stylistic judgment.)

Ronald375 · Answer

Luckily for us we only saw bubbles. Since the lake is a crater lake it's very likely the bubbles were indeed gasses, which could point to very little volcanic activity.
Thanx for your answer!

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