Mono Lake is a large salt lake in California, located east of Sierra Nevada and 13 miles east of Yosemite Park. Today, Mono Lake is being used as a tourism spot and also a home for more than a million birds. The birds are fed there through alkali flies and brine shrimps. The lake happened to last for thousands of years in a desert climate because of the streams from the Sierra Nevada. The lake is also fed by snow and rain that flow into it. Mono Lake is known to have very salty water because it is formed in a closed hydrological basin that the water flows into the lake, but it doesn’t flow out. The only way for the water to leave the lake is through evaporation. For the reason the lake doesn’t have an outlet, salinity is naturally created. Millions of tons of solids that dissolve in the lake is why the lake is 2-3 times saltier than regular ocean water.
However, the problem comes to this. In the 1940s, the city of Los Angeles started to divert stream water from Mono Lake to supply for its own. 17% of Los Angeles’ water was from Mono Lake and Mono Lake began to dry out. The fact that Los Angeles is only receiving the clear stream water from Mono Lake is another reason why Mono Lake is saltier than regular ocean water. It also creates large number of salt that plies on the lakebed. Before the transaction of water from Mono Lake to the city of Los Angeles, Mono Lake was covered with 60,000 acres of water. However, in the 1980s, the lake decreased down to only 40,000 acres. Even today, Los Angeles is receiving water from Mono Lake.
There is no doubt that this is a man-made problem. The diversion of stream water from Mono Lake to Los Angeles is a man-made problem because this was done by human ideas. As mentioned before, Mono Lake decreased its size from 60000 to 40000 acres of water. By the way, this whole transportation of water from Mono Lake to Los Angeles is processed through this giant project called, Los Angeles Aqueduct....