Wrestle with the earth forever
Botanists, satellites, and politicians
Dig, dry, destroy
The butterfly effect
Uncanny playspace
Turbine testing and wind on demand
Fluid dynamic domestication
So, is it beautiful?
Monitoring, monitoring, monitoring...
Moving the [atmospheric] river
Exhibition
Curatorial Conversation
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About
They doubted man could move rivers, but Mulholland did. They also doubted man can make rain, but now we do. As Jack Nicholson’s character finds out in “Chinatown” amid the early days of burgeoning Los Angeles, everything was about the water. It still is.
Since 2022, LADWP has quietly contracted Nimbus Weather Solutions for weather engineering technology to extract rainfall over the Owens Valley catch basin. Under an expensive cloud seeding initiative, LADWP has installed 23 ground-based seeders, foggers, and nitrate emitters on ridgetops encircling the upper valley. These units stimulate precipitation by dispersing seeding agents of silver iodide or nitrate particles into the clouds that roll down from the Sierra Nevada.
The first year of cloud seeding produced extraordinary results, as the southern Sierra Nevada achieved nearly 300% of its average annual snowpack. While promising, a season of regional flood damage underscored the dangers of bending the natural cycles yet again. Clearly, more needs to be done to study the inevitable ripples of environmental impacts, as well as the direct particle exposure effects on human crews who open up the seeding machines for complex maintenance.
Unlike other, more kinetic dust control measures, there is a seductive elegance to the fantasy of playing with clouds. Blending our machines with mother nature appeals to many of our fantasies of utopian god-play. It also makes it easier to deny our impact once we don’t like what we’ve done.
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