Owens Lake is a mostly dry lake in the Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada in Inyo County, California. It is about south of Lone Pine. Unlike most dry lakes in the Basin and Range Province that have been dry for thousands of years, Owens held significant water until 1913, when much of the Owens River was diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, causing Owens Lake to desiccate by 1926. In 2006, 5% of the water flow was restored. As of 2013, it is the largest single source of dust pollution in the United States.
History
Owens Lake was given its present name by the explorer John C. Frémont, in honor of one of his guides, Richard Owens. The lake is called Patsiata by the Mono people.
Before the diversion of the Owens River, Owens Lake was up to long and wide, covering an area of up to . In the last few hundred years the lake had an average depth of , and sometimes overflowed to the south, after which the water would flow into the Mojave Desert. In 1905, the lake's water was thought to be "excessively saline." It is thought that in the late Pleistocene about 11–12,000 years ago Owens Lake was even larger, covering nearly and reaching a depth of . The increased inflow from the Owens River, from melting glaciers of the post-Ice Age Sierra Nevada, caused Owens Lake to overflow south through Rose Valley into another now-dry lake bed China Lake, in the Indian Wells Valley near Ridgecrest. On November 5, 1913, William Mulholland finished the Los Angeles aqueduct. Water was piped and canalized from Owens River to the Van Norman Reservoir.
Starting in 1913, the river and streams that fed Owens Lake were diverted by Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) into the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and the lake level started to drop quickly. As the lake dried, soda processing at nearby Keeler, California, switched from relatively cheap chemical methods to more expensive physical ones. The Natural Soda Products Company sued the city of Los Angeles and built a new plant with a $15,000 settlement. A fire destroyed this plant shortly after it was built, but the company rebuilt it on the dry lake bed in the 1920s.
During the unusually wet winter of 1937, LADWP diverted water from the aqueduct into the lake bed, flooding the soda plant. Because of this, the courts ordered the city to pay $154,000. After an unsuccessful appeal to the state supreme court in 1941, LADWP built the Long Valley Dam, which impounded Lake Crowley for flood control.
A 2004 court order required the LADWP to reestablish a small flow from the river into the lake. In winter 2006, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power restored 5% of the pre-aqueduct flow to the river by court order, allowing the Owens River Gorge, the river bed in the valley, and Owens Lake to contain a small amount of water. The lake was the epicenter of a magnitude 5.8 earthquake that occurred on June 24, 2020.
In 2022, Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District successfully sued LADWP for failure to control pollution at Owens lake on sensitive Native American cultural resources land
In 2023, the lake flooded for the first time in over 100 years due to the numerous storms that struck California during the first three months of 2023.
Conditions
The lake is a large salt flat whose surface is made of a mixture of clay, sand, and a variety of minerals including halite, burkeite, mirabilite, thenardite, and trona. In wet years, these minerals form a chemical soup in the form of a small brine pond within the dry lake. When conditions are right, bright pink halophilic (salt-loving) archaea spread across the salty lake bed. Also, on especially hot summer days when ground temperatures exceed 150° F (66 °C), water is driven out of the hydrates on the lake bed creating a muddy brine. More commonly, periodic winds stir up noxious alkali dust storms that carry away as much as four million tons (3.6 million metric tons) of dust from the lake bed each year, causing respiratory problems in nearby residents. The dust includes carcinogens, such as cadmium, nickel and arsenic.
Management
The LADWP and the California State Lands Commission own most of the Owens Lake bed, though a few small parcels along the historic western shoreline are privately owned. In 2004, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) acquired a parcel at the foot of Owens Lake. Designated the Cartago Wildlife Area in 2007, it is one of the few remaining spring and wetland areas on the shore of Owens Lake. CDFW is using mitigation funds from CalTrans to enhance habitat.