california

“Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and, just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of the Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The wind shows us how close to the edge we are.”

– Joan Didion, California author

For breathtaking volcanic scenery, few places have the variety found in Lassen Volcanic National Park in the Cascade Range of Northern California. The park boasts five varieties of volcanoes: plug domes, cinder cones, lava cones, shield volcanoes and a stratovolcano called Brokeoff volcano (or Tehama volcano). Bubbling hot springs, boiling mud pots and fumaroles in six geothermal fields in the southern part of the park complete the picture.

As California enters its third consecutive year of drought, officials are standing by for the state’s wildfire season, set to peak later this summer. They have reason for concern: During the previous two summers alone, wildfires have burned more than 12,000 square kilometers and killed more than two dozen people. A new study offers advice on how California can minimize wildfire deaths and save property: Don’t force residents who live near the margins of forest and urban areas to evacuate; instead, give them the option of staying and defending their homes.

November 26, 1872

On a foggy day in 1871, two men walked into the Bank of California in San Francisco. One held a rifle and the other gripped a large buckskin pouch. Both were covered in a thick layer of grime. Initially, the nervous teller took the shady drifters for bank robbers. But his anxiety turned to elation when they showed him the contents of their pouch — a shimmery bounty of diamonds, rubies and sapphires.

Over the past century and a half, the river delta that provides Central and Southern Californians with drinking water and farmers with productive cropland has sunk about two and a half centimeters each year. Some of the delta’s islands now lie more than six meters below sea level. Two thousand kilometers of aging levees keep them dry for now, but as the land sinks, the pressure on the levees grows. Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey in California have uncovered a way to rebuild the delta and sequester carbon in the process.

At 10 a.m. local time Thursday, a massive magnitude-7.8 earthquake struck Los Angeles. But don’t worry — it was only a drill.