Mono Lake: Seven Hundred Sixty Thousand Years and a Fight Over a Pipe

Mono Lake has been here since before modern humans. Seven hundred sixty thousand years, the geologists say, making this body of water older than our species by a substantial margin. The landscape you are looking at is not scenery. It is time made visible.

The towers rising from the lake's surface are called tufa, and they are made of limestone. For centuries, freshwater springs seeped up through the alkaline lake floor, carrying calcium. When that calcium met the carbonate in the water, it deposited limestone, column by column, century by century. The tufa towers were building themselves underwater the entire time. Nobody saw them until nineteen forty-one, when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began diverting the streams that fed the lake, and the water level started dropping.

Over the next four decades, the lake fell forty-five feet. Islands became peninsulas. The land bridge to Negit Island, a major nesting colony for birds, emerged from the water, and coyotes immediately found it. About eighty percent of California's breeding California Gulls nest at Mono Lake; two million migratory birds pass through each year, sustained by the brine shrimp and alkali flies that live in the lake's peculiar chemistry. The species of brine shrimp here, Artemia monica, exists nowhere else on earth.

In nineteen seventy-eight, sixteen college students decided to do something about it. They founded the Mono Lake Committee and pursued a legal theory that California's public trust doctrine, which had always protected navigable water, also protected the lake's ecosystem. Most environmental lawyers said this would not work. In nineteen eighty-three, the California Supreme Court ruled in their favor. In nineteen ninety-four, the State Water Resources Control Board issued an order requiring the lake to recover to a specific elevation. It was the first time a court had used the public trust doctrine to override a city's water rights.

The lake is still rising. It has not yet reached the nineteen ninety-four target. The tufa towers are still there, still forming where the springs still flow.