California’s once-parched landscape is blooming with magnificent red, orange, and yellow blooms that can be seen from space.
From the mist-shrouded San Francisco Bay Area to the Mexican border and across the deserts of Arizona, there are flashes of color popping up after an unusually wet winter helped produce a so-called ” Superbloom,” according to CTV News Canada.
A series of storms inundated California, leaving behind record amounts of rain and snow, halting the state’s three-year drought, and setting prime conditions for millions of dormant seeds to sprout.
Botanists say wildflowers are expected to bloom well into May, with some areas just starting. “One of the things unique about this year is how incredibly widespread it is,” said Naomi Fraga, director of conservation programs at the California Botanic Garden. “It’s pretty spectacular.”
In Arizona’s deserts, blue lupine and orange poppies surround towering saguaro cacti, while delicate orchids dot Northern California’s forests, like the calypso orchid or “fairy-slipper.”
California’s superblooms this year are so lush and so exuberant that they can be seen from space. Satellite images from Maxar Technologies, a Colorado-based company, show striking images of bright orange, red, yellow and purple blooms across southern California.
Wildflower seeds that accumulated underground through a series of punishingly dry years are finally coming up, UC Davis plant sciences professor Jennifer Funk explained in a news release. “A very wet year – like the year we are having now – could trigger germination of all of these seeds at once, leading to a superbloom.”
“In general, people are quick to dismiss deserts as wastelands,” said Cameron Barrows, an associate research ecologist at UC Riverside’s Center for Conservation Biology, in a press release. “The truth is that deserts are teeming with a biodiversity … Wildflower years such as this one give folks an opportunity to challenge those misconceptions.”
Satellite images of Carrizo Plain National Monument, just west of Bakersfield, California, taken on April 6 and released by NASA, show valleys surrounded by craggy mountains with a coating of deep purple. Images of the same area from the previous year when California was in severe drought showed it was mostly brown.
