Natural History Wanderings

A number of newspaper articles have suggested that California’s three-year drought may be the beginning of a long period of drought. Historically, California has had multiple drought periods of over 10 to 200 years and one that  lasted over two hundred years.

There is an interesting article and interview with UC Berkeley paleoclimatologist B. Lynn Ingram, who studies climate by teasing data out of rocks, sediments, shells, microfossils, trees and other sources. She states

California hasn’t been so parched since 1580.

The 20th century was unusually mild here, in the sense that the droughts weren’t as severe as in the past. It was a wetter century, and a lot of our development has been based on that.
The late 1930s to the early 1950s were when a lot of our dams and aqueducts were built, and those were wetter decades. I think there’s an assumption that we’ll go back to that, and that’s not necessarily the case.

Read the interview at: Why state’s water woes could be just beginning