Heartbeat of the Delta
Location: San Joaquin Delta, CA
Created 05/01/2013 07:33:15 am
Camera: Canon EOS 7D
Lens: EF24-105 f/4.0L IS @ 24mm
Aperture: f/8 ; 1/2000; ISO 400; HDR pano; 8 shots; stitched in Photoshop
Imagine a verdant, marshy landscape filled with Tule Elk and Pronghorn Antelope cautiously grazing while keeping an eye out for the occasional Grizzly Bear wandering by. In the early-to-mid 1800s, this scenic natural landscape was mostly marshlands and was how the California Delta appeared to the 300,000 Native Americans who inhabited the land. Thousands of years of decomposing tules and vegetation created the native fertile peat soil. Unencumbered by levees, the Delta freely pulsed and surged in large natural tidal swings, and was filled with a large variety of native fishes. Today, it is an entirely different place. The Delta is now a 738,000-acre, highly productive zone that was created where two great rivers enter into slower-moving water influenced by Pacific Ocean tides. These rivers are the Sacramento River (flowing from the north) and the San Joaquin River (flowing from the south). The modern landscape of the Delta is a myriad of islands maintained by dikes rather than levees. Due to subsidence and shallow water tables, many reclaimed areas are now as much as 20 feet below sea level. As a side note, modern-day water usage wars in the Delta falsely put the blame on agriculture, where in reality, the Delta Islands put more water back into the Delta than they take out. Mount Diablo (photo center), named in the late 1700s 'Monte del Diablo,' was described as a dense thicket of willows at the valley's north end, which Spanish soldiers believed was possessed by evil Indian spirits and was named as such. In the early 1900s, during levee construction, this small island (front center) called 'Five-fingers' was carved out by dredger to give boaters a haven to dock their boats. Water and wind are the key players in the Delta. See if you can spot the 750 wind turbines near Rio Vista (far right) powering a 150-megawatt wind turbine farm. The Altamont Pass (far left) had over 4,000 turbines at the time of this photo; in 2016, developers removed 569 old turbines dating from the 1980s and replaced them with 23 new turbines, some towering over 250 feet tall.
The San Joaquin Delta is widely perceived as in crisis today, 'highly important, highly complex, and highly compromised.' Nowhere do the strands of California water history get tangled into trickier knots than in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. For its ecosystem to survive, we must balance the climate, water usage, and centuries of California's water regulation.
