"Kathleen O' Neal & Michael W. Gear - People 5 - People Of The Sea" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Neal Kathleen)

projects on which he had worked in California. Sierra Adare spent many
hours locating and ordering books and articles--not to mention running
front-line defense in difficult times.

Michael Seidman is never far from our thoughts.

Linda Quinton, Ralph Arnote, Yolanda Rodriguez, John DelGaizo, Maria
Melilli, Natalie Farsi, Rae Lindsay and Ellisa Mitchell deserve special
thanks for their superb work on our behalf.

And Harriet McDougal continues to be the heartbeat of this series. Her
talent and caring oversight keep it, and us, going.

Last, our readers should be aware that the opinions expressed by the
characters in this book are not necessarily those of the authors!
Foreword

During the last Ice Age (the Pleistocene epoch), the Pacific coast,
from Vancouver to Southern California, was a very different place than
it is today.

The Sierra Nevada mountain range in California underwent extensive
glaciation. In the region between Lake Tahoe and Yosemite, an ice cap
three thousand feet deep stretched eighty miles long and forty miles
wide. The Merced drainage, the San Joaquin River drainage and the
Kings and Kaweah basins, as well as Kern Canyon, were sculpted by ice
fields and glaciers. A coniferous forest of Douglas fir, cypress,
giant redwoods and pines thrived along the coast--where now there is
only chaparral.

East of the Sierras, the glacial climate spawned enormous inland lakes.
Honey Lake in California and Pyramid Lake in Nevada are tiny remnants
of Lake Lahontan, which covered forty-three thousand square miles and
was five hundred feet deep. Lake Bonneville, of which the Great Salt
Lake is a vestige, was twice the size of Lake Lahontan.

Because so much of the earth's water was tied up in glaciers and lakes,
the world's sea levels dropped approximately two hundred and eighty
feet. The Pacific shoreline extended ten to thirty miles farther west
than at present. Familiar places such as San Francisco Bay did not
exist. The Channel Islands, off the coast of Santa Barbara, were one
long island, seventy-eight miles long by twenty miles wide, that
stretched to within seven miles of the mainland.

The great North American glaciers--the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice
sheets, which covered most of Canada and
scooped out the Great Lakes--began rapid melting about eighteen
thousand years ago. But between ten and twelve thousand years ago, the
Sierra Nevada mountains were locked in a glacial advance. Called the
Tioga glaciation, it depressed sea surface temperatures, cooled the air