Hello Chris,

Found this on the net. This research is by Scott Stine, and is a short piece about evidence of paleodroughts in Yosemite and Mono Lake. Through C14 he has fixed the dates of two major droughts in the Sierra Nevada around 1000AD and 1350AD. This time frame roughly corelates to the dessication of Lake Cahuilla (Salton Sea) here in the south. If his theory is true, could be what is happening on the west coast now. Here is what seems to be a good thesis statement by the author;

[Evidence is now emerging that the "dry-winter-in-California, wet-winter-in-Alaska" model holds true not only for 1976-77, but for much of upper Medieval time as well. In Alaska, as in most other areas of the world, glaciers are now melting back rapidly in response to global warming. As the ice streams around Prince William Sound recede, geologist Greg Wiles and his co-workers are discovering newly exposed stumps, rooted in place on the recently deglaciated canyon floors, that were sheared off near their bases when the glaciers last advanced. Radiocarbon dates on the stumps indicate that they died (and that the glaciers therefore advanced) between AD 900 and 1300—the very time when California was in deep drought. Importantly, these south-Alaskan glaciers—the Princeton, Sunlight, McCarty, Northwestern, Aialik, Sheridan, and Stellar—are known from monitoring to advance in response to wet winters. These glaciers, and the sheared stumps persisting from their last advance, therefore indicate that while California was experiencing profound drought during the centuries straddling the last millennial turn, Alaskan winters were abnormally wet.]

Sounds interesting. Two page link.

Glen

• Paleodrought