The surface of the water was like glass as the John LeConte slowly headed out from Tahoe City toward one of its six solar-powered research buoys in the center of the lake. During the half-hour journey, boat captain Brant Allen shared the lessons that he has learned from his countless hours on the water while I marveled at the awesome views from a boat in the middle of Lake Tahoe.
The UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center (TERC), which owns the LeConte and another research vessel (the Bob Richards), is the hub for Lake Tahoe research. But it’s the work of the research vessels and their gutsy captains that are at the frontlines of understanding Tahoe’s past and its uncertain future.
Lore
With 22 years of experience on the LeConte, which was named after a former president of the University of California, Allen has some interesting tales of adventure. He remembers when then-President Bill Clinton and Vice-President Al Gore were here for the Lake Tahoe Summit in 1997. When Clinton and Gore were taken on the research boat for a tour, Allen says he was inexplicably chosen to be one of the very few people invited, while countless noted dignitaries were left on shore. Later, he found out that the reason he was chosen was because of Secret Service requirements. If Bob Richards, the boat captain at the time, was unable for any reason to carry out his duties, they wanted someone else on board who could operate the boat.
Captain Allen also likes to tell an older story, one about the devastating impacts on McKinney Bay from a large earthquake that occurred thousands of years ago. A shallow shelf of land follows a fault line under the lake between Tahoe City and Sugar Pine Point. During the earthquake, a several-mile wide chunk of the shelf collapsed and sent huge piles of debris most of the way across the lake. It likely created a gigantic splash followed by a tsunami that today would make Tahoe the lead story on the Nightly News. Scientists from the Scripps Institute published a study earlier this year that says that an earthquake of at least 7.0 occurred on the West Tahoe fault between 4,100 to 4,500 years ago, and that one of that size occurs somewhere in the Tahoe area every 2,000 to 3,000 years. The question is, when will the next big one hit?
Allen has never experienced a tsunami, but he has encountered one of Tahoe’s more powerful weather events – winter fog.
‘Every once in a while in the winter we have a week when the lake is fogged in completely. Without radar I couldn’t find my way home,’ he says. ‘One very foggy day I was coming in and was trying to find the marina. I passed the shallow water buoy just off shore and still couldn’t see the marina. It’s all instrument-driving during the foggy days.’
Luckily for Allen, trying times are usually balanced by amazing times. This summer, while assisting a submersible research vehicle, which can see the depths of the lake better in the darkness, Allen worked all night on the LeConte. Fortunately for him, it was the height of an incredible meteor shower, and there he was, treated to one of the greatest shows on earth, from the center of Lake Tahoe. It doesn’t get much better than that.
Even after all these years, Allen still is passionate about studying the lake. Summing up why he enjoys the challenges of his job, he says, ‘I get to experience some aspect of all of the research that happens in Tahoe.’
Lessons
On the LeConte, the water and the land remained calm as we pulled up next to one of the research buoys, anchored to the bottom of the lake some 1,500 feet below. The buoys, a joint project with NASA, monitor air and water temperature, precipitation, wind speed, and barometric pressure plus provide information on water clarity. Due to the highly accurate temperature gauges, NASA uses the buoys for satellite calibration – one of only three places on earth that the agency uses for this purpose.
While Lake Tahoe is still one of the clearest lakes in the world, declining clarity has been a prominent concern for more than 40 years and TERC continues to closely monitor changes in the lake ecosystem. The buoys collect samples of the rain, snow and nutrients that fall directly into Lake Tahoe, giving invaluable information on what factors impact lake clarity.
TERC’s research vessels also assist the study of invasive species such as Asian clams, which have already been found in the lake, and quagga and Zebra mussels, which everyone is trying their best to prevent from gaining a foothold in Tahoe. This past summer they experimented with two different techniques of removing Asian clams. One called ‘diver-assisted suction removal’ involves sending divers over the clam beds to suck them out with a vacuum device, and the other involved putting a bottom barrier over the clams, which is basically smothering them with a blanket. TERC is still evaluating the effectiveness of the small-scale test plots used for each technique, with plans to begin the eradication effort in February 2010.
~ Tim Hauserman wrote ‘Tahoe Rim Trail’ as well as ‘Monsters in the Woods: Backpacking with Children.’
