New photos show how a ghost lake in the US has resurfaced | climate

Lake Tulare, located in California’s Central Inland Valley, was once the largest freshwater lake in the United States west of the Mississippi River.

Then it dried up.

Since the 1920s, the waterways that flowed into the lake have been blocked and diverted, and the lake bed has become home to farmers with crops and livestock. Among other things, cotton, tomatoes, wheat and nuts are grown here.

Mission Lake in California

Occasionally, after particularly wet winters, the water can return to Lake Tulare.

And this year it did – with flying colours. She wrote that the lake had grown to cover more than 77 square kilometres The New York Times At the beginning of April. It is expected to continue to grow and may reach an area of ​​more than 500 square kilometers in the next few months.

The large and rapidly growing volumes of water have already wreaked havoc. Watchman He writes that entire communities were forced to evacuate earlier this spring, while thousands of livestock were lost in floods and crops were destroyed.

Theory: Floods by 2024

Tulare’s return comes after California has been hit by several severe storms with gales and torrential rains. Winters were also rich in precipitation, and as summer approaches, unusually large amounts of snow melt in the Sierra Nevada, which then finds its way down the valley across the Kern River.

according to NASA Earth Observatory – which published satellite images of development around Lake Tulare from February to May – flooding at the bottom of the lake could continue until 2024. Partly it will affect the population of the region, and partly the land used for food production. In Corcoran, which sits on the edge of the historic lake and is only one of several places at risk of flooding, a project has begun construction on the city’s protective dam with a good meter.

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