California ghost lake reemerges after 130 years, drowning 94,000 acres of farmland
A California “ghost lake” that disappeared in the 17th century is making its grand return after 130 years, swallowing up 94,000 acres and counting of private farmland.The Tulare Lake in California’s San Joaquin Valley began to dry up in the late 1850s — not through some fluke, but through deliberate action taken to reshape the land at the expense of the existing ecosystem and nearby indigenous communities.
More than a century later, the lake started to bounce back with a vengeance in 2023 thanks to the massive winter storms across the Golden State and snowmelt from Sierra Nevada.The lake once spanned over 100 miles long and 30 miles wide.“Tulare Lake was the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River.It’s really difficult to imagine that now,” Vivian Underhill, a researcher formerly at Northeastern University studying the phenomenon, told Northeastern Global News.There were manmade basins around where the lake formerly resided, but the sheer flux of snowmelt overwhelmed them all and submerged acres on acres of farmland.
While it has come at the expense of fertile farmland, the lake’s return has already started to revitalize the once-lost ecosystem in the valley.Ducks and other waterfowl have flocked to the lake’s shores for the first time in years and frogs have even started to make themselves at home on the edge.“Once, there was so much water that a steamship could carry agricultural supplies from the Bakersfield area up to Fresno and then up to San Francisco,” Underhill told the outlet.The indigenous Tachi Yokut tribe who originally called that part of the valley home dubbed the lake “Pa’ashi,” and it proved to be central to their lives.
But then the state drained the lake in a process called “reclamation.” “If people could drain that land, they would be granted ownership of parts of that land.So there was a big incentive for white settlers to start doing that work,” Underhill told NGN.
So, hundreds of irriga...