SCIENCE

The ghost of Tulare Lake is back, flooding California’s Central Valley.

Published

4 days ago

March 28, 2023

When American settlers arrived in California 150 years ago, the vast Central Valley was home to the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River. Lake Tulare expanded each spring as rain and melting snow filled the valley, becoming so large that fishermen could swim across its surface to catch a turtle for San Francisco restaurants. But the land barons who took over the region soon drained the lake and planted it with crops, making it one of the country’s most productive agricultural centers.

Now that California is ending its historically wet winter, Tulare Lake reappeared for the first time since 1997. As the runoff from several rivers drains into the valley, the houses, streets, and fields at the bottom of the 1,000-square-mile lake are flooding again. The flooding will only intensify over the next few months as the state’s record-breaking snowpack melts, flooding the area with the equivalent of 60 inches of rain.

Lake Tulare has always appeared in especially wet years, but this time the floods will be stronger: the region’s powerful agricultural industry has exacerbated the risk of flooding around the lake, pumping out huge amounts of underground groundwater, turning the region into a giant bowl. Farmers overflow the basin’s aquifer by about 820,000 acre feet per yearmuch more water than Los Angeles consumes in the same period, and because of this pumping, the southern part of the Central Valley is sinking faster than almost any other place in the world.

Subsidence occurs throughout California, but the problem is most acute in the Tulare Lake region, which is about 200 miles north of Los Angeles. Some cities at the bottom of the lake have sunk as much as 11 feet in the last half century. This rapid decline makes homes and crops in the basin much more vulnerable to flooding than when the lake last appeared 35 years ago. What’s more, dams and flood channels become less effective as the land around them subsides.

“Lake Tulare is playing flood Russian roulette and they just lost,” said Deirdre De Jardine, an independent researcher and consultant who has studied flood risks in the Central Valley. “Water flows differently due to subsidence and they don’t have any flood control.”

An 1873 map of California showing the former boundaries of Tulare Lake Early American settlers drained the lake and planted crops on the dried lake bed.
David Rumsey Map Collection

Although the risk of flooding due to subsidence has increased, local leaders have rebuffed state efforts to fund new flood defenses. When California began to develop the project State Flood Protection Plan after Hurricane Katrina, many agriculture-dominated Tulare Lake Basin flood control counties and districts withdrew, denying themselves public funding for new dams and bypass systems.

“Local representatives who were present at these meetings were completely adamant that they did not want to be part of the state plan,” said Julie Rentner, president of River Partners, a California-based environmental organization that helped develop the plan. plan. “They felt they had the situation under control. Particularly in some of the more conservative parts of California, there is real concern and real suspicion that a state that interferes with water management will have a detrimental effect on local communities or the local economy.”

In other cities, such as Sacramento, the state has spent billions to improve the network of dams and canals that help manage runoff, but there is no centralized flood control infrastructure at all in the Tulare Lake Basin. Master Plan for Flood Control in 1972 when the ground in the area was several feet higher. The only dams at the bottom of the lake are owned and maintained by local flood control districts, which often lack the capital to make significant improvements. It seems that this structure will almost certainly collapse as the lake reappears in the coming weeks, and some have already.

Officials responsible for managing groundwater around Lake Tulare have also resisted government attempts to control the rate of subsidence. Earlier this month government officials punished a group of local groundwater control agencies for failing to establish “minimum thresholds and measurable targets” to counter the drawdown, as required by state law. The agencies said they wanted to limit the region’s subsidence to 1 to 2 feet within 20 years, and senior government officials thought it was a typo.

(Groundwater agencies and flood control districts representing the Tulare Lake area did not immediately respond to interview requests.)

A flood map compiled by Kings County, California, shows the former outline of Lake Tulare. The lake was formed after a series of atmospheric rivers crashed into California.
Kings County Office of Emergency Management

Most of the land at the bottom of the lake is owned by the JG Boswell agricultural company, founded by the famous country baron of the same name. Boswell is one of the titans of the Central Valley and has long been one of the largest private farms in the world, growing cotton, tomatoes, wheat and a host of other foodstuffs on fertile land that used to be under water. The company maintains pumps and flood chambers to protect its crops from flooding, but many of its fields are likely to be flooded this spring.

But not only agricultural land can be flooded. There are half a dozen small towns in the Tulare Lake Basin, including Allensworth, the oldest black-founded city in California, and Corcoran, which is home to a large state prison and a large number of farm workers. Due to the rate of water subsidence, these cities are becoming more vulnerable to flooding every year, and this year some of them have already taken on several feet of water. Earlier in March someone cut a hole in a fence near a local stream, flooding Much of Allensworth.

The car is surrounded by flood waters and flooded farmland near Allensworth, California. Much of the surrounding area was flooded when Lake Tulare reappeared.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

Few people in these cities are immune from flooding. Corcoran, one of the largest cities at the bottom of the lake, has a population of about 22,000, but only five of its households participate in National Flood Insurance Program. In addition, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has not updated federal flood maps to account for water settling over the past decade, so many residents of flood zones may not even be aware of the risk they face.

The worst is yet to come. Snowpack in the southern Sierra Nevada is nearly three times the annual average, and warmer temperatures will see the equivalent of 60 inches of rain fall on Lake Tulare. This water will hold for months or even years; as the lake grows, flooding could spread north towards the city of Fresno, more than 40 miles away, endangering thousands of homes and farms. At the bottom of the lake there are also objects such as sewage sludge composting plant which may leak or rupture when the area fills with water.

The result is a cruel irony. The draining of Lake Tulare has allowed the agricultural industry to flourish in the southern Central Valley, but that same industry has left the region more vulnerable than ever when the lake returns.

Related Topics:Californias central flooding ghost Lake Tulare Valley

Up Next

Startup makes giant meatballs from lab-grown mammoth meat

Don't Miss

Thames Water ordered to fix leaks before pumping millions of liters from rivers | Water

Click to comment

SCIENCE

British scientists have found one of the largest black holes ever discovered

Published

2 days ago

March 30, 2023

Jan Topete

British astronomers have discovered one of the largest black holes ever discovered.

A team led by Durham University used gravitational lensing to find a supermassive black hole.

Gravitational lensing occurs when a celestial object has such a massive gravitational pull that it bends time and space around it, bending light from a more distant object and magnifying it.

They also used supercomputer simulations on the DiRAC integrated supercomputer facility, which allowed the researchers to study how light is bent by a black hole inside a galaxy hundreds of millions of light-years away.

WEBB TELESCOPE CAPTURED DISTORTED SPACE, A GALAXY BILLIONS OF LIGHT-YEARS

Artist’s impression of a black hole, where the black hole’s strong gravitational field distorts the space around it. This distorts the background light images almost directly behind it into sharp, circular rings. This gravitational “lensing” effect offers an observational method to infer the presence of black holes and measure their mass based on how large the deflection of light is. The Hubble Space Telescope is targeting distant galaxies whose light travels very close to the centers of intermediate foreground galaxies, which are expected to host supermassive black holes a billion times the mass of the Sun. (ESA/Hubble, Digitized Sky Survey, Nick Reisinger (skysurvey.org), N. Bartmann)

A university release says the group has simulated light traveling through the universe hundreds of thousands of times, with each simulation involving a black hole of a different mass that changes the light’s path to Earth.

By including a supermassive black hole in one of their simulations, they found that the path traveled by light from the galaxy to Earth matches what is seen in real images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.

They discovered a supermassive black hole in the foreground galaxy, an object with a mass more than 30 billion times that of the Sun.

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON SAYS JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE IS A WINDOW TO THE UNIVERSE

An astronaut aboard the Atlantis spacecraft took this image from the Hubble Space Telescope on May 19, 2009. (NASA)

Durham University said it was the first black hole discovered using gravitational lensing. Durham University astronomer Professor Alastair Edge first noticed the giant arc of the gravitational lens while looking through images of the galaxy in 2004.

“Most of the largest black holes we know of are in an active state, when matter pulled close to the black hole heats up and releases energy in the form of light, X-rays and other radiation,” says lead author Dr. This is stated in a statement by James Nightingale.

Massive galaxy cluster RX J2129 is captured in this observation by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope. Due to gravitational lensing, this observation contains three different images of the same supernova galaxy, which you can see here in more detail. Gravitational lensing occurs when a massive celestial body causes enough space-time curvature to bend the path of light passing by or through it, almost like an enormous lens. Gravitational lensing can cause background objects to appear strangely distorted, as seen in the concentric arcs of light in the upper right corner of this image. (ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, P Kelly)

“However, gravitational lensing makes it possible to study inactive black holes, which is currently not possible in distant galaxies. This approach could allow us to detect many more black holes outside of our local universe and show how these exotic objects have evolved in cosmic time.” — said the professor of the physics department.

CLICK TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

The results were published in a study also involving the Max Planck Institute in Germany, in a journal. Royal Astronomical Society Monthly Notices.

Julia Musto is a reporter for Fox News and Fox Business Digital.

SCIENCE

US can meet climate targets by 2030, but much remains to be done

Published

2 days ago

March 30, 2023

Jan Topete

CLIMATE WIRE | A couple of new laws, combined with new climate regulations, give the United States a shot at meeting its 2030 emissions targets under the Paris Climate Agreement. But before 2030, a lot could go wrong.

These are the conclusions Thursday report The Rhodium Group, which is exploring America’s path to achieving its goal under the Paris Agreement.

The report says the United States is in a significantly better position to pursue its climate ambitions following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act last year and a bipartisan infrastructure deal in 2021. .

To achieve the goal, new pollution standards must be adopted, most of which have not been finalized by the Biden administration. Resolving transmission fights and bottlenecks can derail clean energy projects. Supply chain restrictions could drive up the price of renewables, electric vehicles and technology needed for green factories, slowing down their rollout. And the victory of a candidate in the 2024 presidential race who does not consider climate a priority could lead to the fact that the implementation of new climate incentives in the country will stall.

“It’s not as easy as passing a bill by Congress at the moment,” said Ben King, an analyst at Rhodium who helped write the report. “This is work that is being done through the federal government, with a lot of rulemaking across multiple agencies. This is work that is being done in a wide variety of states that are pursuing aggressive climate protection policies.”

The long to-do list is responsible for the wide range of rhodium emissions.

In a climate-best-case scenario, U.S. emissions will be 51% lower than 2005 levels by the end of the decade. This would satisfy the 50-52% reduction in emissions stipulated by the Paris Agreement. However, achieving this goal will require the effective implementation of new laws, a set of rules designed to limit pollution from cars, power plants and factories, and reduce clean energy costs.

However, emissions cuts could fall as little as 32 percent if implementation of the legislation fails and new pollution rules are crushed in court or left on agency drawing boards. In this case, low fossil fuel prices will also increase energy consumption and emissions.

A number of federal regulations will be particularly important in determining whether the United States is meeting its climate goals, King said. New EPA regulations on everything from mercury and greenhouse gas emissions from power plants to vehicle emission standards and methane limits for the oil and gas industry could cut greenhouse gas levels by 6 percent, rhodium has found.

The Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure agreement provide economic incentives to green the economy, but there are no requirements under these laws that companies must comply with. That’s why the new federal pollution standards are so important, King said.

“Ambitious federal action in these areas is a prerequisite for achieving the Paris climate goal,” he said. “A lot of things can go wrong that could keep us at the bottom of that range. But a lot can go wrong.”

SCIENCE

A Mississippi tornado scoured the ground so hard it left a scar visible from space

Published

2 days ago

March 30, 2023

Jan Topete

These days we are used to seeing very high resolution satellite imagery showing the horrific effects of extreme weather. Below I give a particularly impressive example: the before and after images of the devastation caused by the tornado are one of at least 20 during an outbreak in the south that devastated Rolling Fork, Mississippi on March 24, 2023.

But what struck me even more was the wider perspective in the image above, released by NASA. Instead of a relatively close view of homes and businesses torn to shreds, the Landsat 9 image shows a scar carved into the landscape by one of the March 24 tornadoes. The tornado trail seen in the image is just over eight miles long.

Here’s an even wider view showing the entire 29-mile tornado track:

A wider view of the area around Winona, Mississippi taken on March 24, 2023 by Landsat 9. Almost the entirety of the 29-mile tornado scar is visible as a brownish scar embedded in the landscape. (The box in the upper right corner shows part of the scene visible in the image at the top of the article. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory)

It first landed in a wooded area near Black Hawk, Mississippi, in the lower left corner of the image. With winds reaching 155 miles per hour, it broke and uprooted trees, overturned vehicles and destroyed homes and other structures. Three people tragically died.

Before and after satellite imagery shows the extent of damage done to homes and businesses by tornadoes that swept through Rolling Fork, Mississippi on March 24, 2023. To: December 27, 2022. After: March 26, 2023. (Source: Maxar Technologies) via twitter)

An even stronger tornado touched down about 70 miles to the southwest. During its almost 60-mile journey lasting over an hour, this twister winds reached at least 170 mph.

The tornado that swept through Rolling Fork left much of the tiny town in ruins, as tragically shown in high-resolution before and after satellite images.

At least 21 in Mississippi and one in Alabama lost their lives as powerful thunderstorms caused a tornado outbreak across a wide swath of the Deep South. In Sharkey County alone in western Mississippi, 13 people out of a total population of 3,700 died during the hurricanes.