Mono Lake, California#
by members of the AirPano Team that is a member of the global-geography Consortium.
with kind permission of AirPano
The Mono Lake is a salty and alkaline lake: there are 4-7 trillion brine shrimp living in the lake as well as millions of alkali flies that live both in the water and along the shore. Many limestone figures called tufa are shown from water.
The Californian Lake Mono is a unique one and it is obliged of that fact to... a human being and the civilization which attacks to the nature. The lake is located at a height of 1945 meters, its area is 150 square kilometers and the average depth is 43 meters. There are many lakes with the same parameters on the Earth. But precisely here the amazing sculptures are shown from water. Each sculpture is a unique one: are they walls of the ancient dead city or an army created from the dragon's teeth which stands here and protect the last borders.
But the secret of the fanciful towers is more than banal. In the middle of XX century, to satisfy the needs in water of Los Angeles they had to take water from the local rivers. As a result, the lake's level dramatically fell by 15 meters uncovered the calciferous-tuff figures from water. The program devoted to the safety of the unique lake the Mono Lake Committee was created in 1978. In 1994, the California State Water Resources Control Board reached a decision which mandated that the lake had to rise to a level of 6,392 feet above sea level. After this the lake's level began to rise and, probably, in future these idols will hide their secrets under the water column again.