Tonight’s the final night of the week long celebration of the Wilderness Act and ends with the Beaver Safari right here in Martinez. I got worried yesterday that participants would park at Amtrak and get ticketed so I called everyone to make sure. We will bring some displays, handouts, a photographer (Cheryl) and the beavers will bring THEM SELVES which will be perfect.
Would a fleeting otter or blue heron visit be too much to ask?
There’s an interesting (and surpringly well-researched) article in the Press Democrat about water flow since the earthquake and the really funny part is that I heard about this a week ago from our beaver friends in Napa. The little beaver pond they were watching has been overflowing since the big shake, and they wondered why? I told them to talk with flood control just in case a pipe had been dislodged. It turns out that when the tectonic plates shift, there is often more water squeezed out of the aquifer, and its been observed for centuries.
Napa quake jumpstarts stream flows, though probably only temporarily
Three creeks in Sonoma Valley and two more in Napa and Solano counties have dramatically increased water flows since the Aug. 24 earthquake in Napa County, a phenomenon familiar to scientists for more than a century and well established in Santa Rosa history.
Carriger Creek, a steelhead spawning stream on the city of Sonoma’s west flank, was bone dry — save for shallow, isolated pools of water — before the magnitude-6.0 temblor went off 12 days ago from an epicenter about 9 miles to the east.
As far back as 1865, a local newspaper described rising streams in the Santa Cruz Mountains following a magnitude-6.5 quake on the San Andreas fault, and a federal government study found the magnitude-6.9 Loma Prieta quake in 1989 squeezed about 23 billion gallons of groundwater from the same mountains.
Neither scientists nor Sonoma County historians were surprised by the watery aftermath to the Napa temblor.
“Seismic events have long been known to cause changes in the level of oceans, streams, lakes and the water table,” said a 66-page USGS study of hydrological disturbances from the Loma Prieta quake, including a tsunami in Monterey Bay and increased stream flows in the Santa Cruz Mountains and as far as 55 miles from the epicenter.
You could say that this is the silver lining to us all foolishly living on a serious of faults, but of course we need the water IN the sponge as well. Whether we use it up above ground or underground, it’s still used up – and a good time to remember that we need MORE BEAVERS to keep it around longer.
But of course the press is too busy having fun with the beaver attack story from Nova Scotia to talk about any of this. Here’s the latest from the National Post in Canada. I offer this without comment or pointed I told you so.
Vicious beaver attacks Halifax snorkeler off Nova Scotia’s coast
