Great flood of 1862

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Sacramento during the Great Flood of 1862: Boats on K Street (contemporary lithograph )

The Great Flood of 1862 (Engl. Great Flood of 1862 ) was a tsunami in the Pacific Northwest of the United States , in which between December 1861 and January 1862 parts of California , Oregon , Nevada and neighboring states were flooded. Scientists now attribute the flood event to a series of atmospheric rivers that triggered heavy rainfall over a period of around 40 days. The floods in Sacramento were so severe that eyewitnesses spoke of " Lake Sacramento " (English Lake Sacramento ) and the seat of the capital of California had to be relocated to San Francisco . In some parts of California's long valley , the water level reached a depth of 30 feet (9 meters), so that the recently established telegraph connection between San Francisco and New York collapsed. The loss of about a quarter of the estimated 800,000 head of livestock led to an end to the social dominance of ranchos in California . Today, the flood of 1862 is considered the largest flood event in living memory in the history of the American West. More recently, the disaster has been processed in the United States Geological Survey's Arkstorm scenario .

literature

swell

Representations

Web links

Commons : Great Flood of 1862  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d B. Lynn Ingram: California Megaflood: Lessons from a Forgotten Catastrophe , in: Scientific American, January 1, 2013, last accessed January 7, 2017.
  2. Overview of the ARkStorm Scenario on the pages of the US Geological Survey, last accessed on January 7, 2017.