When the Desert Blooms

Anza Borrego Desert State Park in Southern California (iStock)

James MacDonald
JSTOR

The California desert is awash in color. Following a winter of exceptional rain, desert wildflowers have bloomed en masse, carpeting the normally drab landscape with a riot of bright blues, yellows, and reds. The rare phenomenon has drawn delighted tourists from around the world (some of whom, unprepared for the heat, are passing out). The event is dubbed a “super bloom.”

What causes a super bloom? The short answer is evolution. The desert is a tough environment for a plant. Accordingly, desert plants have evolved a variety of ways to cope with heat and dryness, such as thick succulent leaves which can store water (e.g. cactus) and a special form of photosynthesis where gas exchange occurs at night to prevent water loss (also cactus).

Desert wildflowers are mostly annuals, which grow, live, produce seed, and die over the course of one year. If an annual plant is going to grow, it needs to be certain that it will be able to complete a life cycle and produce seed, or else its ability to pass on its genome—its fitness—is compromised. To make sure that it can find the right conditions for optimal growth, a desert annual seed can lie dormant for years, even decades. There is a compound in the seed coat that inhibits growth. The seed cannot germinate until the seed has been exposed to sufficient rainfall to leach the growth inhibitor out of the seed. Prime conditions for one seed will work for others, so when the right conditions come along lots of plants take advantage at once.

What counts as enough rain to really get those seeds germinating depends on temperature. In hotter deserts, more rain is required since evaporation occurs; under cooler conditions, less precipitation is necessary since evaporation is reduced. Basically, water use by plants is more efficient when it isn’t so hot. Conditions for a “good wildflower year” occur roughly every 5 to 7 years. This time frame corresponds roughly to ENSO (e.g. El Niño) years, when wetter conditions come to California. Exceptionally good years come maybe once a decade.

Since the conditions for a super bloom are local, a boom year in one area may be a dud in another. This year’s bloom is localized in Southern California, and is not connected to ENSO; these conditions are truly exceptional. Following years of punishing drought, dormant seeds were raring to go. At the same time, the tongue of moisture from the Pacific known as the Pineapple Express has caused exceptionally heavy rains and lower temperatures throughout large swaths of California. For a wildflower, the combination is like hitting the lottery. Even a brutal drought has a silver lining.

Conservationists say Glen Canyon coming to life again

Hite Marina, Lake Powell, Utah (Photo courtesy of the Glen Canyon Institute, St. George News)

Written by Dan Mabbutt
StGeorgeUtah.com

SOUTHERN UTAH – If you haven’t noticed, due to the driest years since Glen Canyon Dam was built, Glen Canyon is coming back to life, according to the Glen Canyon Institute, a nonprofit organization that has been working on restoring Glen Canyon and a free flowing Colorado River since 1996.

“This is the worst 14-year drought period in the last hundred years,” said Larry Wolkoviak, director of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Region. According to Bureau of Reclamation’s figures, Lake Powell is less than 45 percent full. The once thriving Hite Marina sits dry with the free flowing Colorado River in the distance.

Eric Balken, programs coordinator for the Institute, gave a presentation at a recent Zion Canyon Natural History Association event in Springdale and said that if the weather patterns of the last few years hold, Glen Canyon will be restored to its former glory no matter what the policy of the government is.

Using pictures of slot canyons that had been under water for decades, Balken showed that a lot of the restoration has already happened. Balken said that the Institute had sponsored explorations of the newly exposed side canyons in Glen Canyon and, much to their surprise and delight, Glen Canyon is coming back much faster than they thought it would.

Balken’s main message was that we can do much better than that. In formal filings to the Bureau of Reclamation, the Institute has proposed a plan they call, “Fill Mead First.”

Earlier this year, the Bureau announced it was cutting water flow from Lake Powell to Lake Mead. Only 7.48 million acre-feet of water will be released from Lake Powell, which is projected to cause an 8-foot decline in water levels at Mead this year. Federal managers will also only allow so much water to be released so that hydro-electric power generation at Glen Canyon Dam can continue unhindered.

According to the Institute, trying to maintain two large reservoirs on the Colorado at partial capacity wastes water and creates problems.

One of the biggest problems is that, every year, Lake Powell loses water worth $225 million through leakage into the porous sandstone and evaporation. Concentrating the limited Colorado River water in just one reservoir would solve much of the problem and would restore much of Glen Canyon.

Christy Wedig, Glen Canyon Institute director, said: “Fill Mead First would recover up to 300,000 acre feet of Colorado River water to the system …. Any water releases from Glen Canyon Dam in excess of the 8.23 or 7.48 million acre-feet could be credited to the upper basin through administrative action. This credit could be drawn upon in lower flow years.”

If nothing is done and nature does essentially the same thing, no credit could be claimed by upper basin states, which includes Utah.

Wedig said that Utah and the other upper basin states could be required to deliver water to lower basin states under the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, called a “compact call.” According to Wedig, “The upper basin has a fleeting moment of negotiating power with the lower basin. If water levels continue to decline, there is an increasing possibility of a compact call. Under this scenario, no upper basin diversions would be allowed until lower basin rights are met. The upper basin can use their current leverage to negotiate safeguards against a compact call.”

The claims the lower basin states have over the upper basin states regarding the Colorado River is one of the many items opponents of the proposed Lake Powell Pipeline point to as why that project may not be feasible in the long term. The Glen Canyon Institute stands with other groups that oppose the pipeline.

As for the Colorado River, Eric Millis, Deputy Director of the Utah Division of Water Resources, said the Bureau of Reclamation has mapped the river’s annual flow between 1490 and 1997 through a tree ring study. According to the data, he said the annual flow has been fairly consistent, even in lean years.

“Continued mismanagement of this crucial resource will lead to the ultimate collapse of the river’s ecological, recreational, and economic outputs,” Wedig said.

As an example, Wedig said Pat Mulroy, general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, recently called for Federal Disaster Relief funds due to the impending drought. “Implementing Fill Mead First would eliminate the need for this assistance and save taxpayers money,” Wedig said.

The Glen Canyon Institute plan does not call for Lake Powell to be completely drained. Their current proposal claims to stabilize the lake at the minimum power pool level.

Wedig said this would “recover many of the landmarks throughout Glen Canyon, stabilize Lake Mead water supply and allow for power generation at Glen Canyon Dam.”

She also said the advantage of the proposal is that it could be done without renegotiating the Colorado River Compact.

Stinky L.A. smell tied to dead fish in the Salton Sea, officials say

Dead fish along the Salton Sea shoreline in southern California. The South Coast Air Quality Management District acknowledged the possibility that dead fish at the Salton Sea are partially to blame for the rotten-egg smell reported all day Monday. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

Los Angeles Times

Regional air-quality managers on Tuesday said that the rotten egg odor that hit Southern California on Monday came from dead fish in the Salton Sea.

Air samples collected in the Coachella Valley, near the Salton Sea and elsewhere clinched inspectors’ suspicions of the 376-square mile, murky body of water as the source of the pervasive smell. Atwood said AQMD inspectors collected air samples which contained hydrogen sulfide.

Inspectors found concentrations of the gas, a product of organic decaying matter, heaviest close to the Salton Sea, with a pattern of decreasing concentration farther away.

“We now have solid evidence that clearly points to the Salton Sea as the source of a very large and unusual odor event,” said Barry Wallerstein, executive officer of the South Coast Air Quality Management District.

How unusual? As late as Monday night, AQMD officials weren’t even sure it was scientifically possible for a malodorous scent to trek the distance the Salton Sea’s fumes did. So they asked an air-quality modeler to use sophisticated computer modeling to find out if it was “theoretically possible” for a stench to travel that far.

“I think we’ve shown it was theoretically possible,” said Sam Atwood, a spokesman for the AQMD. “But this is just something we did not expect.”

Inspectors ruled out landfills, oil refineries and a natural springs site as possible sources.

“The air samples were the final piece of the puzzle,” Atwood said. “Our inspectors did go out to the Salton Sea and did smell some very strong odors at the sea, as well as at the locations leading up to it.”

But it took the might of a powerful storm blowing from the southeast to bring the stench of the Salton Sea to L.A. All in all though, L.A. got lucky, compared with the town of Mecca, just north of the Salton Sea, and Indio, which received larger doses of the gaseous, funky odor.

“The storm originated in the Gulf of California and the Sea of Cortez and hit the Imperial Valley and Salton Sea,” said Tim Krantz, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Redlands. “We had huge squalls and pretty heavy winds in the Coachella Valley. The winds pull the surface layers of the sea off from the southeast to northwest, and that surface water is replaced from the depth.”

And those depths are all kinds of stinky.

Experts said the winds from the Sunday night storm unsettled the fetid layers of water near the bottom of the sea, bringing them to the surface.

Andrew Schlange, general manager of the Salton Sea Authority, said that in the last week, a large number of fish died in the body of water, likely exacerbating the problem. But he said the fish die-off, which is a normal occurrence, was not significant enough on its own to explain the well-traveled odor.

Rather, he said, the storm upset an anaerobic—or oxygen-deprived—lower layer of the sea, where organic material lays decomposing, releasing the noxious hydrogen sulfide gas, with its distinct rotten egg smell.

The good news was that by Tuesday the odor had greatly diminished. As of about 5:30 p.m. Monday, there had been 235 complaints about the smell, Atwood said. Since then, there have been less than 10, though the “sulfur-type” odor still lingered in some parts of the region.

Atwood said a meteorologist for the AQMD has looked at the thunderstorm reports, and that along with wind-measuring instruments in the Coachella Valley, they determined that winds of more than 60 mph blowing from the southeast probably blew the rank odor to the L.A. Basin.

“That’s unusual because usually the winds are blowing in the opposite direction,” he said.

The Salton Sea has lost much of its depth. It's about 50 feet at its deepest point, with an average depth of about 30 feet, Schlange said. That means it doesn’t take as potent a weather event as it did in the past to cause an upswell that sends the water near the bottom to the top.

Schlange said the Salton Sea is losing much more water through evaporation than is being replenished through agricultural runoff and other sources. If water wasn’t flowing into the sea, it would lose a depth of about 4 to 6 feet a year through evaporation.

If something isn’t done to better replenish the Salton Sea, Schlange said issues with far-flung odors could be more common in the future. He said there’s a plan to do mitigation work on the sea, but money to fund it is lacking.

“All of a sudden Sunday evening, we had all these conditions that came together to allow something like this to occur,” Schlange said. “It’s occurred before, but not at this magnitude.”