ニューヨーク・タイムズさんのインスタグラム写真 - (ニューヨーク・タイムズInstagram)「Tulare Lake has re-emerged after intense storms battered California this winter, and it will probably remain in the Central Valley for months — and maybe years — to come. The Tulare Lake Basin once held the largest body of freshwater west of the Mississippi River, but it was dammed dry by humans. The lake has periodically tried to make a comeback, though rarely with the force seen after this winter’s storms. First a trickle, then a flood, the water that coursed into the lake bed over a handful of months swallowed one of the nation’s largest and most valuable stretches of cropland in about the time it takes to grow a tomato. Now, at the onset of summer, Tulare Lake sits at about 168 square miles, trapped by thousands of acres of clay soil and the lack of a natural outlet, so big that it is best tracked by satellites. Caused initially by climate-amplified sheets of rain over the riversheds coursing through the Sierra Nevada, it is being fed by the melting snowpack that piled up in the mountains to near-record levels. Detours and roadblocks bedeck its shores. Chemicals, manure and diesel pollute it. Palm trees and power poles poke from its surface. Flocks of birds are settling in — swallows, wrens, ducks, egrets, chattering red-winged blackbirds. “I’ve never seen something of this magnitude,” Jeffrey Coughlin, an airboat pilot, said on a recent weekday, threading his bayou-style craft across the debris-filled water. “The devastation that’s affected some of these poor people, farms, homes.” Tap the link in our bio to read more about how the re-emerged Tulare Lake is affecting California’s Central Valley. Photos by @markabramsonphoto」6月29日 9時19分