California's 'Ghost Lake', which disappeared in the 17th century, is back in nature 130 years later, swallowing up 94,000 acres, plus private farmland.
Tulare Lake in California's San Joaquin Valley began to dry up in the late 1850s, not through some accident, but through deliberate actions taken to reshape the land at the expense of the existing ecosystem and nearby indigenous communities.
After more than a century, the lake is making a strong recovery in 2023 thanks to massive winter storms hitting the Golden State and melting snow from the Sierra Nevada.
The lake once extended over 100 miles in length and 30 miles in width.
“Tulare Lake was the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi River. It’s really hard to imagine now,” Vivian Underhill, a former researcher at Northeastern University who studies the phenomenon, told Northwestern Global News.
There were man-made ponds around where the lake once stood, but the massive influx of snowmelt inundated them all and flooded acres of farmland.
Although it came at the expense of fertile farmland, the lake's return has already begun to revitalize the ecosystem that was missing in the valley. Ducks and other waterfowl have flocked to the lake's shores for the first time in years, and even frogs are beginning to feel at home on the edge.
“Before, there was so much water that a steamship could carry agricultural supplies from the Bakersfield area up to Fresno and then to San Francisco,” Underhill told the outlet.
The indigenous Tachi Yokot tribe who originally called this part of the valley home called the lake “Bashi,” and it proved 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 given ownership of portions of that land. So there was a great incentive for white settlers to start doing that work.”
Therefore, hundreds of irrigation canals and basins were constructed to keep water away from the lake.
It quickly dried up completely, freeing hundreds of thousands of acres of farmland — and forcing the Tachi-Yokot tribe off their land, crippling the local ecosystem through drainage.
The return of the lake has raised concerns in the community as the water continues to rise, submerging not only privately owned land, but entire storage warehouses containing materials harmful to the renewable ecosystem, such as fertilizers, manure and even electrical wires.
Not only that, but the Ghost Lake can pass through again. Although it made a stunning comeback last year, this is the fifth time Tulare Lake has made a comeback since 1890.
The pattern of drainage and flooding is almost cyclical and may mean that it is bound to disappear again soon.
