We study the asymptotic dynamics of the lake equations in the following two cases, an island shrinking to a point and an emerging island. For both cases, we derive an asymptotic lake-type equation. In the former case, the asymptotic dynamics includes an additional Dirac mass in the vorticity. The main mathematical difficulty is that the equations are singular when the water depth vanishes. We provide new uniform estimates in weighted spaces for the related stream functions which will imply the compactness result.