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LEE VINING, CA - AUGUST 8: Drying mud is seen on an expanding land bridge that leads to island bird colonies at Mono Lake on August 8, 2022 near Lee Vining, California. Under increasing threat due to extreme drought conditions, Mono Lake, an internationally critical bird habitat, has been the subject of existential battles to keep it from drying up since shortly after 1941, when the Los Angeles Department of water and Power (LADWP) began diverting water from streams that feed the lake. Now, extremely low snowfall accumulations in the Sierra Nevada Mountains are predicted to shrink the lake further to expose more lake bottom and further expand a land bridge which predators can use to decimate shorebird island nesting colonies, including where most of the West Coast's California gull are hatched. Water level drop is exposing tufa shoals and broadening alkali flats, increasing harmful alkali dust storms. Despite the regions clean mountain air, Mono Lake is now the nations largest active source of air pollution for particulate matter less than ten microns in diameter. The 65-square-mile lake is one of the nations oldest at more than one million years old and is 80 times more alkaline than the ocean. Its famous for its calcium-carbonate tufa towers which formed underwater through the interaction of freshwater springs and alkaline lake water. In Summer, 100,000 Wilson's phalaropes stopover during their annual 5,000-mile migration between North America and Argentina. In the fall, 1.5 to 1.8 million eared grebes, a large portion of the North American population, arrive. (Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
