Drought is marking the present in a good part of the planet. Among the affected countries is Spain, where March was the second driest month of the century, according to data provided by the State Meteorological Agency (Aemet). And it is that this third month of the year was dry or very dry in most of the peninsular territory, except in Galicia, southwest of Castilla y León and Extremadura, as well as the Canary Islands and the Balearic Islands. The agency warns, therefore, that the meteorological drought persists.
But while in places like Catalonia some reservoirs are completely empty, in other parts of the world extinct lakes reappear. This is what has happened in the United States, where a body of water that dried up almost 80 years ago is now back in existence.
This phenomenon has occurred in California, where the torrential rains of this humid boreal winter have overflowed the regional reservoirs.
The truth is that this lake was considered the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River. But eight decades ago it disappeared after drying up completely. This was a consequence of agriculture development in the region, which is why water was diverted into irrigation canals reducing the lake, which eventually dried up after World War II and gave way to farmland.
Now, after the rains and once the snow covering the Sierra Nevada mountains melts, experts expect the lake to recover to about unsuspected levels. Although it has flooded several times since its disappearance, most recently in 1983 when a record snowfall fell on the mountains, it had never reached its current magnitude.
A transformation of the landscape
The satellite images that we show at the beginning of this article are already amazing. NASA has shared them to show the lake evolution between March 2022 and the same month of 2023. While last year it was a dry plain, in the most recent image you can see a blue spot in the central part of the San Joaquin Valley that represents the dimension of the body of water .
While this may sound like good news for the environment, it is a setback for the neighbors and the economy from the area. These lands had been used for years for agricultural activity, something that now, with the recovery of water from its natural territory, will be impossible to do.
As explained by the local media KVPRFor thousands of years, the region’s water sustained the Tachi Yokut Native American tribe, who lived and fished on the shores. As the writer Mark Arax, who first came to Tulare in the late 1990s, tells them, during the 19th and 20th centuries they did “everything they could to erase that lake. But you already know, the ground remembers, has memory», sentence.
Both farmers and emergency teams are trying to prevent the rise of the water level. However, fighting against the natural course of the lake is a difficult task. Sean Norman, head of the operations section, insisted on the difficulty of the process: “We have to analyze that if we prevent this water from moving here, where will it go?».
