Project>Mono

Tufa

Dawn at Mono Lake.

If you tell somebody you visited to Mono Lake, a saline sea in Eastern California, chances are, the first thing they will ask you is if you saw the tufa towers. The spiky white and gray rock formations are famous, and not just because of the inside sleeve art on Pink Floyd’s 1975 album Wish You Were Here.

A decade after the classic rock album was released, the towers became — and remain — part of the imaging for a campaign to save the lake, threatened at the time by diversions of its tributary streams to Los Angeles.

Perhaps ironically, it was those diversions that uncovered the tufa towers depicted in the album. The towers only form underwater, when freshwater geysers erupt from beneath the lake bottom. You can think of the towers as calcified springs, and some of the most iconic slender and improbable tufa formations visible now were uncovered as the diversions made the lake drop.

These days, the main threat to Mono Lake is global warming, but the tufa towers are still there, though crumbling slowly to the forces of erosion from wind, snow, waves and rain. They have a timeless story to tell about how Earth’s geochemical processes work.

Think about it for a second. The great core of molten metal at the center of our planet; continent-size slabs of crust oozing along the surface; the weathering, by wind, rain and great sheets of ice grinding down mountains, and water carrying those rocks, sometimes ground into a microscopic powder, back to the sea.

Or in this case, Mono Lake, where the suspended sediments in the mountain water bond chemically with the saline waters of the lake to form new rocks — out of water. It’s a form of alchemy, no doubt, and helped me understand that how interactions between different elements in the Earth system shape the landscapes that we see and use. Our planet isn’t just an inert ball of rock. It’s living bundle of transformational energy.

And, of course, biological life is inextricably linked with those biogeochemical cycles, which are central to some of the theories about how life evolved on Earth. But that’s a different story.

Mono Lake’s tufa also tell stories relevant today, about vast climatic changes that can raise or lower sea and lake levels by hundreds of feet, about ancient 1,000-year droughts, and about how humans have become one of the driving forces of Earth change. Far from today’s shoreline, ice age tufa towers attest to a time when 500-foot-thick glaciers flowed into an ancestral Mono Lake. Other towers, still submerged out in the depths, may show when millennial droughts dried the lake down to a puddle.

All Earth’s systems are connected. Snow, wind and ice weather rocks high in the mountains, water carries the material downstream and in Mono Lake, the sediments re-emerge as tufa formations. @bberwyn photo.

Tufa towers are habitat for wildlife; small mammals, as well as birds like violet swallows and owls find nesting nooks, while other shorebirds use them as lookout perches. And a little farther from the shore, tufa helps cement the fine volcanic ash and sand deposits from the Mono Craters, at least for a time. That process shows yet again how the material helps shape the landscapes we see. Photos by @JuttaStrohmaier.

New land. @JuttaStrohmaier photo.

Of course, Mono Lake isn’t the only place you can find tufa. Rastoke, a Croatian town, grew in an area along the Slunjčica river where tufa also built up ground, a series of terraces and waterfalls that enable people to develop an early milling industry, stoked by hydropower.

Rastoke, Croatia, developed along the Slunjčica River in an area where tufa formations created terraces and waterfalls. @bberwyn photo.

There aren’t too many places that feature interpretive information about tufa, so when I saw this display, I immediately thought of the connection to Mono Lake, where tufa is also a significant part of the landscape.

Most of all what I learned from tufa is not to take any part of this amazing planet for granted. We should tread lightly, with respect, reverence and an open mind, because our Earth has some important lessons for us, if we only learn to listen.

This photojournalism project is made possible in part by a grant from CU Boulder Center for Environmental Journalism Water Desk.