ILLUSTRATIONS

  1.The Grand Canyon, carved by the Colorado River

  2.Donner Lake in northeastern California, the eastern Sierra Nevada

  3.Monument Valley, southern Utah

  4.Schematic west-to-east cross-section from the California coast to the Nevada border, showing the elevation of the Sierra Nevada and corresponding precipitation levels

  5.The Owens Valley east of the Sierra Nevada

  6.Snow surveyors measuring snow depth and water content in the Sierra Nevada

  7.Precipitation during winter from 373 stations in the western United States from 1871 to 2007

  8.Precipitation in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Stockton, California, from 1850 to 2003

  9.Map of California showing the approximate areas of flooding in 1861–62

10.Flood of 1861–62 in Sacramento, California

11.Dust storm approaching a midwestern town during the Dust Bowl, 1932

12.Maps of the western United States showing (A) the correlation between winter precipitation and the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, and (B) the correlation between winter precipitation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation

13.A bristlecone pine growing in the White Mountains, eastern California

14.Arndt Schimmelmann and colleagues examining varved sediments cored from beneath the Santa Barbara Basin

15.Frances Malamud-Roam, B. Lynn Ingram, and Christina Brady coring a small oxbow lake in the Sacramento Valley

16.(A) Sea level changes over the past 500,000 years, showing glacial/interglacial cycles and (B) temperature over the past 20,000 years measured in the Greenland ice cores

17.Ancient tree stumps exposed in southern Lake Tahoe

18.Map of the distribution of enormous late Pleistocene lakes as well as modern lakes discussed in the text

19.Archaeologist Douglas Kennert and his father, paleoceanographer and paleoclimatologist James Kennert

20.Ancient levels of Mono Lake over the past 3,800 years

21.Maps of (A) California and the Great Basin showing many of the locations of paleoclimate records discussed in chapters 8–10, and (B) San Francisco Bay showing locations of cores taken from beneath the estuary and surrounding marshes for paleoclimate studies

22.Montezuma’s Castle, a cliff dwelling just north of Camp Verde in central Arizona

23.Stratigraphy of the sediment core from Rush Ranch, Suisun Marsh, northern San Francisco Bay

24.Oxygen isotope record from foraminifers from San Francisco Bay sediments

25.An ancient tree stump submerged in the West Walker River

26.(A) Fire scars at the base of a Giant Sequoia trunk from the Sierra Nevada, and (B) a cut section of a Giant Sequoia trunk from Tuolumne Grove, Yosemite National Park

27.(A) Fire frequency in the Sierra Nevada based on charcoal abundances from sediment cores compared with fire histories based on fire scars from Giant Sequoias, and (B) the correlation between fire frequencies and means of the Palmer Drought Severity Index

28.Flood sediment layers for the past 2,000 years from Santa Barbara Basin cores

29.Paleoclimate researchers drilling Porites coral heads in the Red Sea

30.Map of California showing aqueducts that bring water to Southern California

31.Map of the southwestern United States showing the Colorado River and its drainage basin

32.Average mean annual atmospheric temperature in the western United States from 1895 to 2010

33.Forest fire in Sedona, Arizona, in June 2008

34.Lake Powell in 2009, showing a white calcium carbonate “bathtub ring”

35.Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta levee break in June 2004

36.Level of Mono Lake for the period 1850 to 2011

37.Mono Lake, showing calcium carbonate “tufa tower” formations