• Here’s another great blog post, this time by Tom Phlip. Executive Strategist from the Metropolitan Water District.  The Metropolitan Water District have put together an excellent animated film on how the Sacramento Bay Delta, which supplies a large percentage of water used in the state, particularly in Souuthern calfirnia, has transformed through human reconstruction in the last 150 years.  While our impact has cost the Delta a lot, it will only cost you 100 seconds to learn more about it.

    Levees have frozen in form a once dynamic Delta

    What is one major difference between working in a newsroom and in a water district like Metropolitan? Engineers. There are none in a newsroom. There are lots at a water district. And some like to illustrate water challenges with cool animations.

    Click here to see a 100-second animation about the last 150 years of human history in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. It is hopefully time well spent.

    Note – This animation is all about the levees and not about the water diversions in and upstream of the Delta, which are another stressor.

    That said, here is one number to remember about the Delta – Ninety-five.

    In today’s Delta, about 95 percent of the original wetlands in the estuary no longer exist because of its more than 1,100 miles of levees. Here is the source, page 86.

    In terms of what lives in the Delta, about 95 percent doesn’t belong there. Here is the source, page 49. An estimated 95 percent of the Delta’s biomass is non-native. That means that the 5 percent of native inhabitants, creatures such as the endangered delta smelt, must compete for survival against the 95 percent of neighbors that came here attached to some ship arriving from overseas, or some other means of transplantation.

    And in terms of its future, there is a 95 percent chance that tomorrow’s Delta is not going to look like today’s because of a significant seismic event. Here is the source of that prediction, from folks at UC Davis and the Public Policy Institute of California, page 48.

    What would a seismic shakeup potentially do to the Delta? That is the next animation – ooh, a teaser to a future posting. It strikes at the heart of an issue that can provoke some rather animated discussions about whether the Delta is at risk, and if so, what we as a society should be doing about it.