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A water warning from an ancient people

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on October 5, 2008 at 6:25 am

From the Sacramento Bee:

They call Chaco Canyon in New Mexico the Stonehenge of America and its nine magnificent pueblos “great houses.” The greatest of them all is Pueblo Bonito, built during the eighth to 11th centuries A.D. Semicircular, three stories high, with two large plazas and numerous subterranean chambers, this stupendous pueblo is one of the great architectural wonders of ancient America.

Places like Chaco Canyon make journeys in search of the past profoundly worth it in a world where so much archaeology is very specialized, often narrow and, frankly, sometimes rather dull. At Chaco even the casual visitor can explore new things for days. But as you visit the great houses, you also see the impact of drought on our world.

We’ve known about the Chaco droughts for years, but it’s only recently that we’ve learned just how widespread droughts were in the American West of a thousand years ago. The great Chaco drought coincided with long dry cycles in California, which provide sobering food for thought today as California experiences another year of drought. Scott Stine, a geography professor from California State University, Hayward, has studied the rings of trees that once grew on the lakebed of Owens Lake on the eastern flanks of the Sierra Nevada. He found evidence of seven droughts between A.D. 900 and 1250. In 1025, the lake level was more than 130 feet below today’s shoreline.

Read more from the Sacramento Bee by clicking here.

October 5, 2008 · Filed Under Climate change & water supply

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