Scientists have suggested that the extreme drought in California will not yet end; despite the fact that it has been raging for five-straight years. New findings based on historic and pre-historic temperatures and climate reveal that past patterns are now being repeated and this can now become a trend for hundreds of years.
This extremely arid climate began in 2012 triggering destructive wildfires. The Governor of California Jerry Brown announced the Drought State of Emergency in 2014.
In the new study, scientists from the University of California, Los Angeles analyzed samples from lake sediments in the Holocene period, including marine sediment records from the Pacific ocean. They obtained sediment cores from Kirman Lake in northern California to compare them with climate trends in the region along with the Pacific's temperature records.
Their data allowed them to make climate predictions based on natural climate forces in the past 10,000 years in the region.
The new findings have presented evidence linking warmer climate and changing Pacific temperatures, which coincided with hundreds of years of drought in California.
According to the lead author of the study, Glen MacDonald of UCLA, in a hundred years or so, forests will retreat, and grasslands along with deserts will increase. Temperatures will become higher as rainfall and snowfall will decrease. Wildfire will also increase and lakes will become even more shallow, turning into marshes or drying up altogether.
In the past, there have been two periods that California has experienced extreme drought like it is doing today; from 6,000 to 1,000 B.C.E. in the mid-Holocene period and during the year 950 to 1250 during the medieval ages.
These two crucial drought periods in the past were apparently caused by a shift in Earth's orbit and sunspots, as well as an increase in volcanic activity in the region. The drought in California today is said to have been caused by increasing greenhouse gas emissions, which are unlikely to be reduced this century.
Apart from this, climate events like El Niño and La Niña are also changing ocean temperatures, and this is contributing to the drought.
This new study has been published in the journal, Scientific Reports.