What scientific mysteries lurk beneath the waters of Lake Tahoe -- one of the deepest lakes on Earth?
Strap on your mental scuba gear and join Jacques Cousteau and his 21st Century scientific successors as they plunge beneath the surface of America's Largest Mountain Lake.
Chapter 1 (Excerpt)
Jacques Cousteau: Diving Beneath the Surface
Legend has it that the corpses of those drowned in Lake Tahoe never rise. Instead they are said to float deep beneath the surface in a perpetual state of liquid limbo—eyes wide open, arms outstretched, and fully clothed. Some old-time Lakers even claim that when Jacques Cousteau, the French inventor of SCUBA, first plunged into the unexplored depths of Lake Tahoe what he found down there astonished him: dozens of fully-clothed Victorian corpses—a sight so appalling that Cousteau allegedly fled straight to the surface, never to return. Sacré bleu.
Armed with modern scuba gear, satellites, and even deep-sea submersibles, a small army of scientists have long since plumbed the hidden depths of Tahoe’s underwater cliffs and canyons—and found no floating human corpses down there after all. Nor is there any record of Cousteau’s alleged visit. Instead what scientists found down there seems equally shocking: fossil evidence of phantom forests up to 6000 years old, formed when droughts dropped the level of the Lake far below its present horizon. Evidence, in short, of catastrophic climate change.
Diving further still, using deep-sea submarines scientists have located the wrecked remains of Tahoe’s lost Titanics—luxurious little passenger steamers claimed by Sierra snowstorms, scuttled by their bankrupt owners, or blown to smithereens by exploding boilers during Tahoe’s Gilded Age (a term first coined by the best-known of all Tahoe authors, Mark Twain).
As Twain himself discovered, myths and magic abound beneath the surface of the Tahoe Deep—including stories of the long-haired, mermaid-like beings called Water Babies, still believed by the local Washoe Indian Tribe to be among the Lake’s most ancient, dangerous, and seductive denizens. Others warn of a Loch-Ness monster affectionately known as Tahoe Tessie. Perhaps that’s why early pioneers claimed that anyone attempting to swim in Lake Tahoe would quickly sink like a stone. As one Washoe elder warned back in the 1940s, “Washoe people don’t swim in Big Water. Water Baby get.”
Scientifically speaking, there may be some truth behind the old myth that human bodies drowned in Lake Tahoe never rise: the same dearth of micro-organisms which helps give Tahoe its legendary crystal clarity helps shield human corpses from the out-gassing bacterial wastes which might otherwise send them rocketing back toward the surface like ghostly balloons. Yet these days, it seems far more likely that any organic detritus—human corpses included—would be quickly nibbled into nothingness by the millions of freshwater crayfish recently introduced into the Lake’s fragile ecosystem, where they spread like a plague beneath the surface. Bon appétit.
Peer beneath the surface of Time itself, and there were far earlier, far deeper, far wider mountain lakes to reckon with than Lake Tahoe: vast inland oceans that made Tahoe look like a pond by comparison. Pleistocene Lake Lahontan, scientists say, once covered much of present-day northwestern Nevada, fed by melting continental glaciers at the end of the last Ice Age—and leaving behind a bathtub ring still visible across the flanks of Nevada’s desiccated mountainsides. In an era when saber-toothed tigers, wooly mammoths, and camels still roamed the Great Basin, Tahoe shivered bravely beneath perpetual snows, its shores gouged by glaciers whose tracks are still clearly visibly etched in granite. Alone among all these lost glaciers and vanished inland oceans, Tahoe has survived to claim the title of the last true Mountain Sea.
So beware, tenderfoot, you have been warned: Peer too deeply beneath the mirrored surface of Lake Tahoe, breathe some life into those old Lake legends, and the secrets that you’ll find hidden in its depths may amaze you. Or frighten you. Or both. For in the end that’s the deepest magic of them all, the inky sorcery upon on which all human literature is founded: that language gives us the power to shatter time; and writing the means by which the voices of those long-dead may speak from beyond the grave. Time out of mind, the corpses of our ancestors confront us—eyes wide open, arms outstretched, and fully clothed.
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