![]() The connection to Columbia dates back to the late 19 th century, when Israel C. “Every time I go I feel like I’ve learned so much that it’s unlikely I will have ever run out of new things to learn.” “I can’t imagine ever not working out there,” Sidney Hemming said, reflecting on the area’s rich geological potential. The broad cut at the center is Mill Creek the narrower cut to the right is Wilson Creek. Shadowed terraces mark ancient shorelines of Mono Lake. Former Lamont researcher Scott Stine has been digging into Mono Lake’s past for more than three decades. The work has been going on for years, involving many researchers from Lamont and elsewhere, including Ali’s advisor, Sidney Hemming, her husband Gary Hemming and her former student, Susan Zimmerman. What will the future hold? Researchers like Ali are trying to find out, by looking deep into the past. Meanwhile, the extended drought in the Southwest has strained more significant water sources for LA and other cities, such as the Colorado River system. If it drops another four feet, Los Angeles would be cut off entirely. But after years of drought, the level dropped a foot and a half over the past two years. Since the agreement took effect in the mid-1990s, the lake has risen halfway back to its targeted level. The amount of water Los Angeles can take now depends on the lake level. Los Angeles cut its water take from Mono Lake, and the city’s Department of Water and Power undertook a broad conservation program. In 1983, the California Supreme Court agreed, and a plan was undertaken to restore the lake. The volunteer Mono Lake Committee, the Audubon Society and others sued, citing laws that required that scenic and recreational values had to be balanced with urban areas’ needs for water. Creeks dried up, and the riparian desert ecosystem “was shattered for decades,” said Bartshe Miller, education director for the Mono Lake Committee, which maintains its headquarters, a gift shop and a row of cabins for researchers and interns in Lee Vining, just above the lake’s western shore. Islands where California Gulls had nested turned into peninsulas, and coyotes trotted across to destroy the rookeries. Tall, craggy limestone towers – called “tufa” - that had formed beneath Mono’s waters now stood on dry land. Tufa are towers of limestone formed underwater by minerals in Mono Lake, exposed when water levels drop. By 1982, the lake level had dropped 45 feet, halving the lake’s volume and doubling its salinity, threatening the wildlife there. ![]() The streams and springs feeding the lake pump in chlorides, carbonates and sulfates, making Mono Lake more than twice as salty as the ocean and highly alkaline, with a pH of about 10.ĭespite that inhospitable chemistry, the lake is a vibrant ecosystem: algae, brine shrimp the size of rice grains, and black carpets of alkali flies provide the base of a food chain that nourishes millions of migrating shorebirds – among them Wilson’s Phalaropes, Eared Grebes and California Gulls.īut Mono Lake is a landscape caught on the edge: Growing Los Angeles, thirsty for more water, began tapping the streams that feed the lake in 1941, using only gravity to send the water through culverts, tunnels and pipes to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, 350 miles south to the city. Primarily fed by snowmelt and rainwater running off the Sierras, it has no outlet. The lake covers about 70 square miles at its deepest, it sinks 159 feet. ![]() It is among the oldest lakes in the United States: at least 760,000 years old, possibly as old as 3 million years. Mono Lake sits above 6,000 feet, just east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and not far from the eastern edge of Yosemite National Park. This is no esoteric question for Los Angeles, whose nearly 4 million people depend in part on Mono Lake’s watershed for drinking water, green lawns, agriculture and industry. Understanding that past will help scientists like Ali, a PhD student at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, project what might happen in the future as the world warms up. He is digging for dates, looking back tens of thousands of years into the last ice age: When was the lake higher? When did it shrink, and grow again? How does that chronology correspond with the advance and retreat of the massive ice sheets that covered much of North America? And how did the lake’s levels respond to changing climate? By studying stream bed sediments, Guleed Ali tries to build a history of how water levels have changed at Mono Lake.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |