Weather channel report on drought in California

California's coastline is essentially all sandstone, so it's always 'falling' or 'slipping' into the ocean and it's almost a sport out there, among the less well-off of course, to watch the houses fall down the cliff sides and onto the highway 101 in front of the beach.... so entertaining... and a reminder of how soon it can all slip away, which is funny, but they simply can't help themselves, same with those building homes in the fire zone, which is pretty much all the mountains... but the views are so grand! :) Besides, isn't the interior valley of California a little below sea-level anyway? So, it wouldn't take much for the water to slip back in.. perhaps up the Baja Cali Gulf? Facilitated by the EQs along that fracture line? Seems natural and happening in slow motion, which makes it so hard to see until the process speeds up, like a collapse in the markets.

There was that article on the 4.0 up in SanFran.... the scientist wondered if it would be a trigger for the 'Big One' which occurs every 140 years or so and we are a little past that.... little ones occur quite often, though not like OK or Puerto Rico area lately, but is this the pattern out there? No big warnings, just a slightly bigger EQ and then a big one.... wasn't that the pattern for the Midwest one... in MO? Little warning? Sort of like all the flash floods lately? People have to know they live in a flood plane, but if it doesn't happen often enough, it gets ignored... and the lands are so fertile there... :rolleyes:

Another thing to wonder is if the El Nino afffect of more rains to downpours in the SW occurs onto this dried up soil that is sinking... could trigger the EQs even more... one thing feeding on the next... domino theory should be working here.
 
Laura said:
What triggered the connection in my head was the "ocean floor begins to subside." Could the ocean floor be subsiding at the same time that valley floors are subsiding?

If the subsidence of the ocean floor is rapid enough perhaps it could cause a tsunami?

See: http://www.sott.net/article/300429-Study-finds-Southern-California-faces-greater-risk-from-an-earthquake-caused-tsunami-than-previously-understood

A concern in my mind is the poor state of levees that shield the Central Valley. A recipe for wiping out many crops.
People also forget that mega storm events can wreak havoc:
_http://www.wsandco.com/about-us/news-and-events/our-perspective-2011/flood-risk

From the article:

"While the state of California is always at risk for a catastrophic earthquake, did you know that the state is at a greater risk for flooding than anywhere in the U.S.? Based on the results of a 2-year study by the U.S.G.S., flood should also be considered a significant concern. What are the primary reasons for this and which regions are at greatest risk?"

and:

"The ARkStorm scenario is an extreme event that could inundate a great portion of California, seriously disrupt commerce and government, affect one in four homes, and take several months to return to basic levels of infrastructure service. An ARkStorm would be unlike any storm that has occurred in living memory. There may be no pattern that forces this storm to occur with regularity, so such an event could occur in any given year. “For a lot of people in California, we just don’t think of ourselves as being this flood-prone,” said Laurie Johnson, an urban planning and disaster recovery expert, and co-author of the report. “It’s just too difficult to comprehend.”
 
the draught is bad... this decade farm prices were at an all time high of $7000 an acre. I think up from $1000 an acre in less than 25 years. Even Harvard has a multi million dollar investment in central valley farmland. And they acquired permits for drilling super-deep wells! Maybe they are selling this now? They should probably be.
 
There are other areas around the world that are experiencing similar problems. Some of them are Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paolo in Brazil. As for the other countries (in addition to California), if you did not have water shortages in the past, will in the future - said the "USA Today" Ben Chou, an analyst with the association for the protection of the environment Council on natural resources, situated in Los Angeles.

The world is slowly running out of fresh water and because the water is now considered a "new oil". With water crisis comes and the food crisis. Almost everything we eat requires huge amounts of water to produce.

What will happen when the water crisis evolve into planetary catastrophe?
The war for water :cry:
 
Laura said:
SeekinTruth said:
Whoa, so this has been ongoing for a while. Those C's sessions certain make one think. The whole water issue of California also reminds me of the movie China Town which is based on some actual background/history.

Yeah, they do make one think, don't they. And with this many years going by, and being able to look back and compare, they sure do stand up well to the test of time.

Indeed! And it's funny how things definitely happen, just not in the way we always imagined (anticipated?) they would.

Here's another report about this current sinking, and images:
https://www.rt.com/usa/312944-california-sinking-nasa-report/

The rate at which land across vast areas of California are sinking due to overconsumption of groundwater is higher than ever, with some places subsiding two inches a month, a new NASA report says. It comes as the state’s farmers pump water faster amid the historic drought.

While California has been sinking for decades, the current rate is among the highest ever measured around the world. The alarming findings of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab are based on satellite and aerial photos and measurements of land subsidence in the state.

An area near Corcoran, in the Tulare basin, sank 13 inches in one recent eight-month period, according to the study conducted for the State Department of Water Resources. A stretch near the California Aqueduct, a key leg of the state canal and pipeline system that brings freshwater from the Sierra Nevada Mountains, sank 8 inches in just four months last year.

The problem is not limited to the San Joaquin Valley, the most arid part of the Central Valley of California. Land near Arbuckle in Colusa County sank five inches during the last half of 2014, the NASA report said.

Heavy pumping of groundwater causes clay between water pockets to collapse and ground to sink. This may damage critical infrastructure and also makes it harder for groundwater reservoirs to replenish. It may also hinder water from flowing through its natural underground pathways. [And is the ocean floor subsiding at the same time, thus sucking water out of the ground? Maybe this is an ignorant question, but I thought of it as a "vacuum cleaner" effect, water not only being drained by humans, but also by the sea itself if the slopes change and a suction force is generated?."]

“Roads can be broken by fissures, pipelines have been exhumed, and the slope of the land can be altered, changing drainage patterns,” the NASA report warns.

Groundwater consumption remains at a historic high amid the drought, while its levels are dropping to record lows of up to 100 feet below previous measurements, says Mark Cowin, head of the California Department of Water Resources.

“We are pumping at historic levels,” Cowin said in a statement cited by AP. “Groundwater acts as a savings account to provide supplies during drought, but the NASA report shows the consequences of excessive withdrawals as we head into the fifth year of historic drought.”

“We will work together with counties, local water districts and affected communities to identify ways to slow the rate of subsidence and protect vital infrastructure such as canals, pumping stations, bridges and wells.”

California, a major farming state, has been reluctant to regulate groundwater pumping until Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill last year ordering local jurisdictions to draw up rules. Most areas have until 2020 to comply, with some able to postpone it till 2022.

“I don't think we can end overdraft or subsidence overnight," the governor said. "We do need to take action."
 
California's infrastructure being destroyed as drought plagued areas continue sinking

Not only is California sinking, there is also a possibility that the current drought in that region can end with a big flood (sooner or later)... Thought the following excerpts from a book were interesting, hope it helps, especially for members living in or close to California!

From the book 'The West without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow':

And what of the opposite climate extreme—the deluges and floods that ended the droughts? How often do these floods, with magnitudes similar to the 1861–62 event {See here: Great Flood of 1862 and here} or even greater, recur? To further explore these questions, we turn next to the Little Ice Age. This cool period, which followed the Medieval Climate Anomaly and lasted until the nineteenth century, brought several megafloods of a magnitude that no one alive today has yet experienced.

The deep droughts of the Medieval Climate Anomaly eventually drew to a close around AD 1400. For much of the 150 years prior to this date, extreme flooding was relatively rare. In California, people who lived in the broad Central Valley and around the San Francisco Bay would have seen irregular rainfall for hundreds of years, with the winters often failing to deliver the big storms that filled the lakes and fed the mountain snowpack. Around the bay, the mounded villages were empty most years; since the drought had begun, the creeks flowing to the marshlands dried early in the summer, forcing the people to make long treks for freshwater or, if their camps were inland near the larger creeks, long foraging expeditions to the mudflats in the bay to collect mussels and other shellfish. The native populations throughout the region suffered, some perished, and some managed to adapt to the dry conditions.

The pattern of weather began to change, however, and those who paid attention would have noticed the series of cold storms that now began the wet season, dumping rain on the coastal settlements and throughout the Central Valley and the lower mountain slopes. Winters were bringing more storms that were colder, and in the Sierra Nevada the snowpack grew thicker and lower on the mountain slopes than it had been in human memory {See this article from Nov 2015: Nearly 60 percent of Sierra Nevada covered with snow; 100 times greater for the same date in 2014}.

This period was known as the Little Ice Age, and, elsewhere around the globe, rivers and canals froze throughout Europe, and valley glaciers grew larger in northern and central Europe, New Zealand, and Alaska. The Thames River in London froze at least eleven times in the seventeenth century. Lower summer temperatures throughout Europe decreased the growing season by several weeks, causing crop failures in Scotland, Norway, and Switzerland and leading to widespread famine. In Norway, there is evidence for more frequent landslides, avalanches, and floods, and, in the Alps, expanding glaciers occasionally crossed valley floors, damming streams and forming glacial lakes. These lakes would on occasion break through the ice dams holding them back, flooding the valleys below.

In California, some of the storms originated in tropical regions of the Pacific, delivering copious amounts of warm rain that led to flooding. These storms would have swept over the Coast Ranges, across the Central Valley, and up into the Sierra Nevada, delivering heavy rain. The rain and the rapidly melting snow would have caused small creeks and rivers to swell into raging torrents, ripping up vegetation and soils in the mountains, and turning California’s Central Valley into a vast inland sea.

Many proxy climate records from throughout California contain evidence that such extreme winter floods occurred between 900 and 150 years ago. Tidal marshes around the San Francisco Bay contain buried evidence of these events in their sediments. Normally, the inflowing river waters spread across the marshes, depositing only a small amount of the finest sediments—clays and silts. Floodwaters, however, carry larger particles in their higher energy flows, depositing a layer of sand and silt on the marshes. Marsh sediment cores reveal that one such layer was deposited on the marshes around AD 1100, and two others around AD 1400 and AD 1650.

Sediment cores taken from beneath the San Francisco Bay itself provide more evidence of the flooding: a gap or hiatus in the sedimentary sequence suggests erosion of hundreds of years’ worth of accumulated sediments from the bay floor. The date for this hiatus matches the earliest of the sand layers in the marsh cores. That such an event is recorded in San Francisco Bay estuarine and marsh sediments suggests a regionally significant flood, affecting almost half of the state—the drainage area of the bay.

Though considered “young” in geological terms, these large floods were not documented by humans living at the time and left no evidence in the archaeological record. [...] Below, we describe several key examples of evidence for megafloods throughout the state of California.

Some of the most compelling evidence of large floods in California has been found off the southern coast, once again in the favorable environment of the Santa Barbara Basin. The location and conditions of that basin have combined to produce one of the most detailed and complete records of climate and environmental change anywhere in the world’s coastal oceans, including a record of runoff into this coastal environment during extreme storms.

[...] [Marine geochemist] Schimmelmann concluded that these sediment deposits must have resulted from enormous flood events—“mega floods,” as he called them.

[...] Ultimately, Schimmelmann found evidence for six megafloods over the past 2,000 years in Santa Barbara Basin sediments that would have affected the entire region. The flood layers could be precisely dated because the sediments are composed of annual layers, analogous to the growth rings in trees. Based on the ages of these megafloods, they appear to have recurred on average every 200 years: AD 212, 440, 603, 1029, 1418, and 1605. During the period straddling the Medieval Climate Anomaly, two cycles were skipped, with 400 years after the floods that occurred in AD 603 and AD 1029.

[...] In its entire history as a state, California has yet to experience one of the mega-floods that Schimmelmann found to be a repeating part of the region’s natural climate. Schimmelmann points out that the periodicity reflected in his record suggests the region is due for another one soon; it has been more than four hundred years since the last megaflood, which occurred in AD 1605.

[...] The evidence for a 200-year recurrence interval for floods as large or larger than the 1861–62 event in California is growing, bringing more urgency to flood policy and planning efforts in the state.

[...] Intrigued by the phenomenon of cataclysmic floods and their possible causes, Schimmelmann combed through the scientific literature and compiled a list of other global events that occurred at the same time as these megafloods. He found that, around AD 1605, at least two major volcanic eruptions occurred: the Huaynaputina volcano in Peru in 1600, and other volcanic evidence revealed in an Antarctic ice core. He also discovered numerous paleoclimate records worldwide showing that the years between 1600 and 1610 were unusually cold, particularly during the summer, with the summer of 1601 being the coldest in the Northern Hemisphere of the past millennium. These records were largely based on tree-ring records from California, Idaho, the Canadian Rockies, Subarctic Quebec, the Gulf of Alaska, New Zealand, Mongolia, and Norway. Ice-core records from both Greenland and Antarctica also suggest unusually cold conditions. But was there a connection between the volcanic eruptions, Northern Hemisphere cooling, and the California megafloods?
 
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