In the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley, just east of Interstate 5, there is a vast depression in the Earth that stretches for miles. It’s hard to notice as you drive by; the land is filled up by farms growing nut trees, cotton, safflower, tomatoes, wheat, and many other crops that help make the Central Valley an agricultural powerhouse. The soil is rich and the sun shines nearly every day, but it is also very hot and very dry. That’s what made it so shocking when, in 2023, that whole vast depression transformed into a massive lake.
The lake was not new to the area; in fact, it was quite the opposite. Over a century before, the land was covered by a body of water known as Tulare Lake (too-LAIR-ee). It stretched across an area of over 800 square miles, and until the 1800s, it was the largest freshwater lake east of the Mississippi. Then, over the course of just a few decades, an aggressive expansion of agriculture across the valley turned the lake into a dry shell of itself.
Tulare Lake lived on in history books, but in the spring of 2023, it came to life again. The lake’s rebirth was the result of a series of extreme weather events called atmospheric rivers , which inundated the land with rainfall, flooding the basin. A year later, it was all gone. The waters receded and the lake ran dry again. Someday though, it will come back.
The Troubling History Of Tulare Lake
It looks nothing like it now, but the San Joaquin Valley was once a massive floodplain defined by marshlands and rivers. These rivers were fed by snowmelt running down from the Sierra Nevada mountain range, and because the valley offers no outlet to the ocean, all the water ended up pooling in the center of the basin, forming a lake. The tule reeds that grew throughout the wetlands were the source for the name, Tulare Lake…