A Vast Lake Has Captivated California Where Farms Stood a Year Ago

[usonian]

NYT. I needed to use the archive to read it.
https://archive.ph/xrlH9

Tulare Lake re-emerged after intense storms battered the state this winter, and will likely remain in the Central Valley for months — and maybe years — to come.

It sounds like the sea and approaches the size of Lake Tahoe. Its wind-driven waves are unexpectedly silky and warm. Tulare Lake seems to go on forever on the immense brown and green flat of California’s Central Valley, shimmering like a great blue mirage.

Three months have passed since the lake, which dates to the Ice Age, re-emerged in the basin that once held the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River. Dammed dry by humans, it has periodically attempted a comeback, though rarely with the force seen after this winter’s storms.

First a trickle, then a flood, the water that coursed into the lake bed over a handful of months swallowed one of the nation’s largest and most valuable stretches of cropland in about the time it takes to grow a tomato. Thirty square miles, then 50. Then 100. Then more.


Now, at the onset of summer, Tulare Lake sits at about 168 square miles, trapped by thousands of acres of clay soil and the lack of a natural outlet, so big that it is best tracked by satellites. Caused initially by climate-amplified sheets of rain over the riversheds coursing through the Sierra Nevada, it is being fed by the melting snowpack that piled up in the mountains to near-record levels.

Chemicals, manure and diesel pollute it. And there are mosquitos.

As always; "Be careful what you ask for. You might get it."

Cross-posted to GD

[Blues Heron]

1. i heard the last time - in the 80s - it took 2 years to dry out

[Mr.Bill]

2. For comparison, I live near Clear Lake.

It is (was?) the largest natural lake in California. It is 44,000 acres with over 100 miles of shoreline. The lake described on the OP is over 107,000 acres.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

3. pictures from the article

Foster Farms, a poultry company that housed chickens on a property in Corcoran, had to evacuate during the flooding.


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/25/us/california-storms-tulare-lake.html

[NBachers]

4. A similar article from the Smithsonian Magazine

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/californias-long-dry-tulare-lake-has-returned-180982507/