Join us for the second speaker in our lecture series, “Refreshments with Refreshing ‘ologists.” On Wednesday, August 10 we will host geomorphologist Scott Stine, a longtime member of the Mono Basin Science Council. Scott’s work has included researching many different topics ranging from lake level fluctuations to dating ages of tufa towers, and his talk will be focused on the volcanic history of Mono Lake’s islands. The talk will begin at 4:00pm in the Mono Lake Committee’s Theater & Gallery. Refreshments will be served. Contact Sarah at (760) 647-6595 for more information!

I was eight years old and it was my first visit to Sea World.

California Gulls wheeling over Mono Lake.

After viewing a spectacular performance by the famous whale, Shamu, I was walking down the boardwalk, munching on a delicious churro, a doughy cinnamon stick, when a seagull landed on my head. While grasping onto my hair, the gull proceeded to peck at my tasty snack. I was terrified. Ever since this horrifying experience, I duck when the shadow of a gull passes over my head. It was not until this summer when I came to work as an intern at the Mono Lake Committee that my fear began to wane and my curiosity (more…)

Now available to download from the Mono Basin Clearinghouse is the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power’s May 2011 Mono Basin compliance report. This annual report discusses previous year and current year operations and monitoring for the State Water Board-ordered requirements of the city of Los Angeles’ water rights licenses. Highlights are (more…)

Kristie Nelson of PRBO Conservation Science taking the crew out to the islands.

Each spring the Mono Lake Committee assists PRBO Conservation Science in doing a California Gull nest count on Mono Lake’s islands. PRBO, whose mission is to conserve birds and other wildlife, has been monitoring the population size and reproductive success of California Gull (Larus californicus) at Mono Lake since 1983. (more…)

NASA’s controversial research about arsenic-metabolizing bacteria in Mono Lake continues to stir up debate. On Friday the journal Science published several articles contesting the validity of the findings, but Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues stand behind their work. Read more here.

NASA researchers on Mono Lake in November 2010. Photo by Arya Degenhardt.

Ever since NASA broke the news in December about the discovery of a bacterium from Mono Lake that appears to use arsenic in place of phosphorous, we’ve been talking fairly often with Dr. Ron Oremland, one of the lead scientists from the US Geological Survey working on the team. He has studied Mono Lake for decades and knows its microbes and chemistry well. He answered our questions about the discovery so that we could write an article about it in the Mono Lake Newsletter and accurately interpret it for the public, and he sent us a batch of his scientific papers related to Mono Lake and arsenic which we’ve posted on the Mono Basin Clearinghouse.

Ron will be speaking on Tuesday April 26th at the Sierra Nevada Aquatic Research Laboratory (more…)

In December, after we posted links to papers by Ron Oremland with the US Geological Survey, Ron sent us a few more references. These are now available here on the Mono Basin Clearinghouse. He also included a few references from lakes with similarities to Mono Lake, such as Big Soda Lake in Nevada and Searles Lake, California.

This brings us to 40 scientific papers or abstracts related to Mono Lake or arsenic that can be downloaded from this page.

If you went on a Friday morning bird walk last summer, you most-likely met Birding Intern Nick Neely. Among Neely’s many accolades, being a writer for High Country News’ “Writers on the Range” series, is one. His recent article, “Alien life, it turns out, is much closer than Mars” deftly weaves the story of the discovery of GFAJ-1 with its home turf at Mono Lake. I highly recommend giving his article a read.

After 28 years of annual gull research on Mono Lake’s islands, you might wonder if there are any unanswered questions still out there. After reading PRBO’s 2010 report on the gull research (you can download the report here), the answer is clearly “yes”—and some of those questions were answered this year.

First, the results from the counts done every year. The 2010 California Gull population at Mono Lake was (more…)

Bacteria gathered at Mono Lake can substitute arsenic for phosphorus in their DNA, reported a NASA science team led by Dr. Felisa Wolfe-Simon earlier this December. The remarkable finding—no other organism on earth is known to do this—drew a huge amount of public attention worldwide (for example, see our wrap-up of network news coverage). It was pretty darn exciting for those of us here at Mono Lake as well, since we know many of the researchers and fielded a deluge of calls after the announcement.

The significance of this finding is tremendous. In short, it changes (more…)