SF Bay's environmental transformation is due to rain, snowmelt - San Francisco Chronicle
SF Bay's environmental transformation is due to rain, snowmelt
Full of cold, fresh rainwater and snowmelt from the Sierra, the San Francisco Bay is in a strikingly different place than it was last summer.
Water gushing out of the delta is flushing out pollutants and contaminants and giving endangered baby salmon a helpful push into the ocean. Longfin smelt and yellowfin gobies are spawning in the usually swampy southern end of the bay, and sediment coming in from mountain streams is replenishing the structure of its basin.
Related Knowledge Center: Climate science
What began as a theory in the 1890s — that industrial emissions of carbon dioxide could increase global temperatures — had progressed to a scientific fact a century later. Scientists across a range of disciplines are studying the impact of the still-growing concentration of carbon dioxide and other so-called “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere as they call for industrial and governmental policies to slow, then halt, the warming of the planet.