“It’s looking like there’s going to be megafires with smoke affecting the lake more frequently: We’re talking two years in a row, and 60 to 90 days of unhealthy air quality and that’s depositing in the lake,” said Jesse Patterson, chief strategy officer for the League to Save Lake Tahoe. The environmental organization is helping fund a recent flurry of research into the smoke’s impact on water quality. “We need to understand what’s going on. Is Tahoe at risk of losing what attracted us all to it?”
The fires are degrading Lake Tahoe’s clarity in multiple ways.
Under normal conditions, sunlight at the high-elevation lake is so intense that algae grow only deep under the water, but the thick smoke has changed that, making conditions more favorable for algae growth closer to the surface. Smoke and ash particles that enter the lake get pushed around by waves and currents and make the water murkier. Those tiny particles also contain nutrients that stimulate the growth of algae, further diminishing the lake’s clarity.
Brant Allen, field lab director for the Tahoe Environmental Research Center, was one of the few people on the lake’s eerily empty, smoke-shrouded waters Wednesday. Standing aboard the 37-foot research vessel the John LeConte, Allen was taking measurements all the way down to the bottom of the 1,645-foot-deep lake.
“The clarity loss we’re measuring right now is fire-related,” Allen said.
Scientists are using research boats, buoys, underwater robots and other instruments to collect data on water clarity, temperature, concentrations of algae and tiny smoke and ash particles and other metrics that will help them understand the extent of the impacts, and how long they could persist.