Runoff and river flow in California fell to a quarter of its normal level, and storage reservoirs saw dramatic declines, falling to about a third of their normal levels. Aquatic habitats were severely affected, with the worst impacts in the lower to mid-elevations of the Coast Ranges and the western slope of the Sierra Nevada. Low river flows, combined with higher water temperatures, severely disrupted the migration and spawning of migratory fish species, including all species of salmon and trout.
The shortage of surface water in the state prompted an increased use of groundwater for agriculture and cities. The proportion of groundwater used increased from 40 percent of the total amount of water consumed during a normal year to 53 percent, causing a precipitous drop in the water table throughout California. Particularly hard-hit was the southern Central Valley the San Joaquin Valley , where the water table dropped so low by up to fifty feet that pumping capability could not keep up with demand from irrigated agriculture, and groundwater depletion was estimated to be five million acre-feet, or four times the annual average.
Nine thousand water wells were deepened or drilled. In order to aid in water efficiency, many farmers shifted from growing rice and other water-intensive crops to grains, particularly barley, wheat, and oats. Well over seven and a half million trees died as a result of the drought. Some regions in the highest elevations of the Sierra Nevada lost three-fourths of their trees, including ponderosa and Jeffrey pines, red firs, and white firs. These trees, weakened by the lack of water, succumbed to insect-related diseases like bark beetle or to longer-term diseases such as mistletoe and root rot.
Wildfires also claimed many trees. In August alone, lightning strikes sparked 1, wildfires in Northern and Central California forests. In Central California, the dry year meant record low freshwater flows to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and San Francisco Bay, with cascading impacts on aquatic ecosystems. Water quality declined throughout the delta, where water is pumped and transported to Southern California, providing drinking water for twenty million Californians.
With lower river flows, seawater penetrated upstream far into the delta, causing chloride concentrations to quadruple. In an effort to prevent this, water engineers released as much fresh water from the meager reservoir supplies upstream as possible and constructed temporary barriers in the delta.
Nevertheless, severely reduced freshwater inflow raised the water salinity in the San Francisco Bay to record high levels, leading to a dramatic decline in the bay's phytoplankton, the base of the estuarine food chain. Fish populations in the estuary crashed as their primary food sources disappeared.
In both the bay and the delta, decreased freshwater flows also increased the concentrations of pollutants, including pesticides drained from farm irrigation fields in the Central Valley. The effects of that extreme year spread like tentacles of pain deep into the ecosystems of the West. California's economy also suffered that year: in the Sierra Nevada, the sparse snowfall had severe impacts on the business of winter sports and the tourist industry. Ski resorts in Northern and Central California were particularly hard-hit.
Some of these resorts never opened, and those that did were forced to close within a very short period. The summer recreation economy also suffered, since resorts on the state's rivers and reservoirs were affected by low water levels and forest closures.
Many of those resorts closed, some declaring bankruptcy, as shorelines receded, rivers dried up, and boat launches and docks were left high and dry.
Fishing, rafting, and other river activities were not possible as flows diminished to a trickle during the summer and fall of Forty-seven of California's fifty-eight counties declared states of emergencies, and severe water restrictions and mandatory rationing was imposed. So desperate was the situation that the state considered increasingly far-fetched and elaborate schemes for getting more water, including importing water by pipeline or railroad from as far away as Alaska's Yukon River, or towing icebergs to the region from Antarctica.
Cloud-seeding was tried in Northern California. But there was a silver lining in all of this gloom. Due to the enormous economic costs, California and other states in the West became serious-for the first time-about water conservation. Low-flush toilets and other water conservation measures got their start.
Industries realized that implementing water conservation measures would be the most effective way to meet future water shortages. For instance, the agriculture industry, which consumes 80 percent of California's fresh water resources, began implementing soil and water conservation practices.
On the other end of the climate spectrum, an overabundance of precipitation and runoff in the West can also prove disastrous, causing massive flooding. Floods are common in the West; seldom has a decade passed free of these devastating events.
During unusually wet years, rivers overtop their channels, inundating vast reaches of land that are typically dry and increasingly populated. The enormous power of a flood destroys everything in its path, leading to landslides and mudflows, washed-out roads and bridges, lost crops, lost homes, even lost lives.
Worldwide, floods cause more deaths each year than any other natural disaster. Climatologists talk about droughts and floods as two sides of the same coin, because the worst floods in the West often followed on the heels of some of the most severe and prolonged droughts.
In , for instance, catastrophic floods hit California and other parts of the West, punctuating the end of the infamous Dust Bowl drought. The northern two-thirds of California suffered severe flooding in December , with record flows on rivers draining the northern and central Sierra Nevada.
Two strong Pacific storms dumped ten inches of rain in Southern California the following February and March, resulting in catastrophic flooding from San Diego to Los Angeles and into the Mojave Desert. Those floods killed people and destroyed almost 6, homes. Next came severe mudslides, destroying all roads leading to the San Gabriel Mountains, stranding residents for days, including an elementary school class forced to climb on top of the cabinets in their classroom to get away from the rising muddy waters that covered their desks.
Following a sleepless night listening to the roar of a small river, the children went outside in the morning to a scene of devastation: entire houses and the remains of houses were strewn haphazardly across the landscape. Farther downstream, the city of Anaheim lay beneath five feet of water, and residents had no choice but to spend the night on their rooftops. The unusually wet conditions of that winter of extended into southern Arizona, where precipitation was 74 percent above normal and the Gila, Salt, and Verde rivers all flooded their banks.
This scenario was repeated two decades later when a period of drought in the s was followed by massive floods in Record rainfall in December that year fell across the state, causing massive flows on Central Valley rivers. In Southern California, Orange County's biggest natural disaster occurred as warm rain melted snow in the San Bernardino Mountains, causing catastrophic flooding along the Santa Ana River. Once again a state of disaster was declared for all of California. Devastating floods are an inevitable characteristic of the climate in the West, a topic we will discuss in future chapters.
Despite a century of elaborate engineering that has attempted to tame and control the flow of water in the region, floods continue to inundate the western United States with a frequency that seems to have increased. Yet the floods that have been witnessed and recorded in the West over the past or so years represent a very small sampling of the deluges and floods that are an integral part of the region's hydrology. Climate researchers are finding increasing evidence for much larger events that have occurred with alarming regularity over the past several millennia.
It must be borne in mind, however, that, despite their destructive potential, floods are a natural part of both the hydrologic and the ecological systems of the West.
Floodwaters carry nutrients and organic material that are deposited onto the surrounding floodplains, producing fertile soils. More than half of the fruits, nuts, and vegetables consumed in the United States are grown on some 87, farms in California's Central Valley.
Nevertheless, residents in California and other regions of the American West continue to face risks from catastrophic flooding as they place themselves directly in the path of floodwaters, building their homes on floodplains that will inevitably be washed away in the next extreme wet year.
To this day, cities sprawl onto the floodplains, housing developments pop up in the deltas, and homes are built on the edges of cliffs and canyons where landslides occur. Clearly, as Steinbeck indicated, society has collectively "lost its memory" of the Earth's climatic past. The worst flood in recorded history in the West occurred in the winter of This deluvial disaster turned enormous regions of California into inland seas for months. Today, these same regions are home to California's fastest-growing cities.
Much can still be learned from that historic flood, since many of the survivors wrote chilling accounts of it. In the next chapter, we focus on the flood of , describing firsthand accounts of harrowing events and drawing the lessons we should have learned from this catastrophe.
The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources. It demonstrates that extended droughts and catastrophic floods have plagued the West with regularity over the past two millennia and recounts the most disastrous flood in the history of California and the West, which occurred in — The authors show that, while the West may have temporarily buffered itself from such harsh climatic swings by creating artificial environments and human landscapes, our modern civilization may be ill-prepared for the future climate changes that are predicted to beset the region.
They warn that it is time to face the realities of the past and prepare for a future in which fresh water may be less reliable. August is National Water Quality Month to highlight the importance of accessing clean water and the importance of water sources in ecosystems. Below are a few UC Press titles that delve into …. Floods and Droughts in Living Memory 1. The — Floods: Lessons Lost 3. The Great Droughts of the Twentieth Century 4. Part II. A Climate History of the American West 5.
From Ice to Fire: Into the Holocene 7. Ice Returns: The Neoglaciation 9. A Growing Water Crisis The Hydraulic Era: Salmon and Dams Future Climate Change and the American West Books Journals.
Disciplines Sciences Natural History Water. One From Drought to Deluge "Normal" Climate in the West And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. John Steinbeck, East of Eden Humans tend to perceive climate as a force of nature, one to be measured, classified, and ultimately conquered. The Importance of Snow In the higher mountain elevations of the West, precipitation often falls as snow.
Climate: The Extremes Scientists began closely monitoring the West's climate after the nineteenth century, recording the region's weather variables: temperature, atmospheric pressure, precipitation, and wind speed and direction. Droughts On one end of the climate spectrum is drought, when the wet season fails partially or altogether. The Driest Single Year in the West: The worst single year of drought in recorded history over much of the American West occurred during the winter of Floods On the other end of the climate spectrum, an overabundance of precipitation and runoff in the West can also prove disastrous, causing massive flooding.
About the Book The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources.
From Our Blog. National Water Quality Month August is National Water Quality Month to highlight the importance of accessing clean water and the importance of water sources in ecosystems.
About the Author B. Reviews "A masterful portrait of how water shaped the American West. Part detective story, part call to action, this book offers vital advice on how to fix the West's looming water crisis. As the West endures its driest year on record, having enough freshwater isn't a given—nor has it ever been, despite society's efforts to conserve and control it. Ingram and Malamud-Roam share how climate change has historically parched the landscape of the West and will lead to extreme water crises in the not-so-far future.
Their foresight makes a compelling case for reducing our water footprint. The authors vividly remind us of two things: first, society ignores the lessons of past climatic extremes at our peril, and second, we can no longer assume that the past is a reliable guide to the future, as human influence over the climate grows. The climate is changing, and our relationship to it must change as well. This book tells us how. By burning millions of years worth of fossil fuels in a couple of centuries, humans have now forced atmospheric change onto our time scale.
Preview — The West without Water by B. Lynn Ingram Goodreads Author ,. Frances Malamud-Roam. The West without Water documents the tumultuous climate of the American West over twenty millennia, with tales of past droughts and deluges and predictions about the impacts of future climate change on water resources. It demonstrates that extended droughts and catastrophic floods have plagued the West with regularity over the past two millennia and recounts the most disastrous flood in the history of California and the West, which occurred in — The authors show that, while the West may have temporarily buffered itself from such harsh climatic swings by creating artificial environments and human landscapes, our modern civilization may be ill-prepared for the future climate changes that are predicted to beset the region.
They warn that it is time to face the realities of the past and prepare for a future in which fresh water may be less reliable. Get A Copy.
Hardcover , pages. More Details Other Editions 4. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about The West without Water , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about The West without Water. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Feb 12, Stephany Wilkes rated it it was amazing. Top notch, crystal clear scientific and history writing.
Thorough without being pedantic, dogmatic or dense. Very well done. The main point: our beloved mild, temperate and fairly stable CA climate is anomalous and has created a false sense of comfort for us. Extensive and severe droughts and floods are normal and climate change is already making these more severe. If that's not enough to get you to read this, there's not much else I ca Top notch, crystal clear scientific and history writing.
If that's not enough to get you to read this, there's not much else I can add to convince you. I appreciated the fact that the authors never forgot a "how": not once do they forget to say how it is that we know something, and usually there are many mutually reinforcing ways that we know something i. I ended the book wishing that just two more points had been tied in to the conversation: the role of federally subsidized flood insurance and corn.
At the end of the book, the authors discuss the severe flood potential in the San Joaquin Delta and Central Valley, and the problem of exploding housing development.
But they don't make a fairly simple policy suggestion though they do make others : end the National Flood Insurance Program NFIP that Congress gave us in the late s. Houses continue to be built in flood plains because there is no cost incentive not to. The state of CA should make purchasing or building a home in a flood plain exactly like building a home on an ocean cliff: you do it at your own risk and no one will give you homeowners insurance for it.
Likewise, insurance companies know that houses in the Central Valley and Deltas are on flood plains and doomed. Insurance companies would never opt to provide flood insurance for these houses or, if they did, it would be prohibitively expensive for most home buyers. If there is no cheap flood insurance available, the risk of flood with total loss which is the true risk is apparent and more obvious, and the "choice" becomes as costly as it should be.
The authors also discuss the excellent idea of "water footprint" and how much water goes into beef production. They wonder why bison are not being raised instead. Well, bison can't eat corn. We have as much beef production as we do because we have federal corn subsidies, which made us figure out how to make cows eat corn. We use the water we do for beef because corn gave us a misguided incentive to make beef production as vast as it is.
I believe that solving the corn subsidy problem would thus also address the beef water cost problem. As a fairly recent California resident just seven years and one point of causal data in the "increasing population" problem, I figured I was especially ignorant on the climate history of the West -- but, it turns out, no more so than my seventh generation husband.
How is it that so many have never heard of the flood of that turned the entire literally entire Central Valley into an inland sea in a very short period of time?
There is a great deal of fascinating paleoclimate history here. Highly recommended. Oct 08, Mary Keehan rated it it was amazing. An absolute must-read for anyone living in the West and Southwest of the United States. This book is skillfully written to encompass the science, history, and human factors that come together to shape water use and misuse in the region.
Understanding how the current ideas about water resources came to be is essential to changing minds about the future of water in states like California. Humans can continue to fight Mother Nature but it will be like trying to hold back the ocean with our hands p An absolute must-read for anyone living in the West and Southwest of the United States. Humans can continue to fight Mother Nature but it will be like trying to hold back the ocean with our hands possibly literally.
Nov 25, Oliver rated it liked it Shelves: non-fiction , social-issues. Based solely on its content, The West without Water certainly merits 4 or 5 stars for the impressive amount of research the authors have done, and the clear and sensible way in which they present it.
Factoring in readability, however, is what ultimately led me to give it 3 stars. The authors attempted to keep the text from being too dry, but did not manage to do so for the bulk of the book.
For one thing, they refer back to a number of studies, findings, events, etc. The West without Water is a reservoir of simulations, observations, and studies conducted by climatologists, geochemists, archeologists, micropaleontologists, dendrochronologists, and other professionals whose line of work I was forced to infer from my knowledge of prefixes. Focusing primarily on the volatile Western region of the United States especially California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico , their research uncovered patterns of extreme droughts and floods, and the interrelationship of atmospheric pressures, wind-ocean currents, water surface temperatures, sea life populations, and many other elements.
Whether drawing conclusions from tree rings or carbon isotopes of sediment layers, scientists can get a pretty good idea about most anything about past climate trends — water salinity, plant variety and concentrations, and shoreline levels. From there, they project likely future scenarios, and the predictions warn of harsher droughts and devastating megafloods unlike any ever seen interspersed throughout.
For example, based on the aging of past megafloods that have occurred in the past 2, years in the Santa Barbara Basin area, they appear to reccur about every years or in two cases , with the last one striking in That means California is overdue for the next one. The last section of the book does discuss some methods for water conservation and preparation for imminent climate change, but is dwarfed by the earlier compilation of findings used to arrive at proof of the need for said alterations.
All in all, the book is very informative, and discusses a very immediate and dire issue, but is a little too much to absorb in one read-through. Oct 03, Jenika rated it liked it. Chapter 14 should be required reading for anyone living in the West. The whole book, really. This book's strengths are its careful cataloguing of many types of research on climate cycles.
This painstaking walk-through of everything from tree ring data to plant pollen in lake sediments to the chemical makeup of drilled coral cores - it truly is an astonishing summary of a research literature.
I learned a lot about methods for assessing climate ch Chapter 14 should be required reading for anyone living in the West. I learned a lot about methods for assessing climate change and applaud the ingenuity of scientists who came up with them.
The downside is that it read more like a scientific review paper than a book, which is a shame given the pressing importance of the topic and the need for public interest in it. I wish the book had repeated the same information fewer times and spent more time exploring the past human impact and what it tells us about future human impact. The passages dedicated to human and wildlife impact were among the most compelling, and would unfortunately, given human priorities do the job better than simply saying "the west faces a dry future" over and over.
I felt the best arguments for behavior change were underdeveloped. Barely a passing mention about how tide marshes can slow waves in storms and rising sea levels, for example - post Katrina, that is a point that the public could more vividly accept, whereas right now too much of the public thinks that wetland preservation is about "saving obscure birds and bugs" at the expense of jobs, and derides reality as a "tree-hugging" view.
I guess the book did what it said in the first part of the title - giving extensive info on past climate changes - I just wish it had developed the "clues about the future" more.
And also, that it had a better editor who encouraged them to write it with more vivid concrete examples of past and future outcomes. Dec 12, Peter Tillman rated it really liked it. The science behind California's water woes: too little, then too much This is a valuable book, well worth your attention, particularly for Californians.
California gets almost all its rainfall in the winters, in just 5 or 6 big storms per year. If there are too few or too many storms Drought is California's ongoing problem, but the worst potential weather disaster that the US Geological Survey has identified, is a repeat of the great California floods of A s The science behind California's water woes: too little, then too much This is a valuable book, well worth your attention, particularly for Californians.
But the authors' basic message is crystal clear: California's climate has taken some nasty turns in the past 10, years, worse than any in the short written history of the state -- and some unpleasant repeats may come back to haunt us. Best to be prepared for the worst. Oct 10, Larsen rated it liked it.
Finally, in Chapter 14, the last chapter page I found what I expected from this book, "Over the past century, society in the West has followed an unsustainable pattern of water use, leaving us more vulnerable each year Yet, Nevada and Utah are competing for groundwater north of Las Vegas. And Utah is actively planning to bring more water from Lake P Finally, in Chapter 14, the last chapter page I found what I expected from this book, "Over the past century, society in the West has followed an unsustainable pattern of water use, leaving us more vulnerable each year And Utah is actively planning to bring more water from Lake Powell to the fast-growing St.
George area. Hite or Hite's Crossing was once a growing, attractive, and impressive National Park Recreation Area at the North End of Lake Powell, but is now a sad memory like a forlorn ghost town with Lake Powell's water miles away and unlikely to return.
Countless more water dilemmas are growing in the West. The ellipsis The whole book misses the point. What good is future predicting of the climate while ignoring sustenance of the growing population's present need for water?
I joyfully concede that the book refreshingly reminded me of I should have remembered. Future climatic extremes are just as interesting as future earthquakes. Much of the academic information was included in the several of John Muir's books I have read. But this book has a weakness I've seen in no other.
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