• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

California’s Ghost Lake Reappears, Then Vanishes Once Again

April 10, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

After 130 years of absence, Tulare Lake briefly remerged from the San Joaquin Valley last year. Now, however, the indecisive “phantom lake” has disappeared into obscurity once again, leaving an uncertain future for the residents and farmers of California’s Central Valley. 

Tulare Lake was once the largest lake west of the Mississippi River, holding a vast quality of water stretching over 160 kilometers (100 miles) long and 48 kilometers (30 miles) wide. 

Advertisement

Known as Pa’ashi to the Indigenous Tachi Yokut tribe, it had served as a traditional hunting and fishing site for centuries. Things drastically changed in the 19th century when the state of California carried out a series of land grabs and put the region under private ownership in the 1850s and ‘60s.

The lake was drained of water and turned into arable farmland. By the 1890s, it had totally disappeared. Its waters briefly reappeared a handful of times over the past century, gaining a reputation of being a “ghost lake”, but Tulare Lake was effectively considered done and dusted.

Then, in early spring 2023, it returned once again in the wake of weather events in southern California. The body of water is fed by the Sierra Nevada mountains, which were struck by several snowstorms in the winter of 2023, causing a flood of water to pour into the San Joaquin Valley. 

The rebirth of Tulare Lake seen in satellite images between March 2 to April 28, 2023

The rebirth of Tulare Lake seen in satellite images between March 2 to April 28, 2023

Image credit: NASA Earth Observatory using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey and MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview

Its rebirth was both a blessing and a curse. While the rising waters destroyed swathes of farmland and property, it also saw the return of native wildlife, plus the Tachi Yokut tribe regained their ancestral lake.

Advertisement

“Most of the news coverage about this time talked about it as catastrophic flooding. And I don’t want to disregard the personal and property losses that people experienced, but what was not talked about so much is that it wasn’t only an experience of loss, it was also an experience of resurgence,” Vivian Underhill, formerly a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeastern University with the Social Science and Environmental Health Research Institute, said in a statement to Northeastern Global News.

“The return of the lake has been just an incredibly powerful and spiritual experience [for the Tachi Yokuts]. They’ve been holding ceremonies on the side of the lake. They’ve been able to practice their traditional hunting and fishing practices again,” Underhill says. 

In early February, Underhill predicted the lake would remain here for at least two years – but within weeks it had almost disappeared. 

“There’s no lake anymore. There’s some wet ground but nothing major,” Doug Verboon, Kings County Supervisor and farmer, told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Advertisement

While it’s goodbye for now, scientists at Northeastern University believe the lake is likely to make more reappearances in the future as climate change will continue to drive intense weather over the Sierra Nevada mountains and fuel flooding in the downstream region. 

“This landscape has always been one of lakes and wetlands, and our current irrigated agriculture is just a century-long blip in this larger geologic history,” Underhill explained. 

“This was not actually a flood. This is a lake returning.”

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. SOSV is building a New Jersey HAX facility for industrial, healthcare and climate startups
  2. Another New COVID Variant Is Spreading – Here’s What We Know About Omicron BA.4.6
  3. DNA And RNA Bases, “Missing” Building Blocks Of Life On Earth, Found On Meteorites
  4. Amazon Rainforest Could Face “Large-Scale Collapse” As Soon As 2050

Source Link: California's Ghost Lake Reappears, Then Vanishes Once Again

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • DNA From Greenland Sled Dogs – Maybe The World’s Oldest Breed – Reveals 1,000 Years Of Arctic History
  • Why Doesn’t Moonrise Shift By The Same Amount Each Night?
  • Moa De-Extinction, Fashionable Chimps, And Robot Surgery – No Human Required
  • “Human”: Powerful New Images Mark The Most Scientifically Accurate “Hyper-Real 3D Models Of Human Species Ever”
  • Did We Accidentally Leave Life On The Moon In 2019 – And Could We Revive It?
  • 1.8 Million Years Ago, Two Extinct Humans Had One Of The Gnarliest Deaths In History
  • “Powerful Image” Of One Of The World’s Rarest Tigers Exposes The Real Danger In Taman Negara
  • Evolution, Domestication, And A Lot Of Very Good Boys: How Wolves Became Dogs
  • Why Do Orcas Have White Spots Near Their Eyes?
  • Tomb Of First King Of Ancient Maya City Discovered In Belize
  • The Real Reason The Tip Of Your Tape Measure Wiggles Like That
  • The “Haunting” Last Message From NASA’s Opportunity Rover, Sent From Inside A Planet-Wide Storm
  • Adorable Video Proves Not All Gorillas Hate The Rain. It Might Even Win One A Mate
  • 5,000-Year-Old Rock Art May Show One Of Ancient Egypt’s First Rulers
  • Alzheimer’s-Linked Protein Levels “20 Times Higher” In Newborn Babies – What Does This Mean?
  • Americans Were Asked If They Thought Civil War Was Coming. The Results Were Unexpected
  • Voyager 1 & 2 Could Be Detected From Almost A Light-Year Away With Our Current Technology
  • Dams Have Nudged Earth’s Poles By Over 1 Meter In The Past 200 Years
  • This Sugar Could Be A Cure For Male Pattern Baldness – And It’s Been In Our Bodies All Along
  • “Cosmic Immigrants”: Daytime Star Seen In 1604 May Be An “Alien Type Ia Supernova”
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version