Cuatro Ciénegas

The Tethys Sea retreats, leaving behind inland lagoons — a fragment of the primordial ocean, sealed in desert rock.

Canals carve through the basin’s veins, turning desert into farmland, and marking the beginning of depletion.

In A Summer’s Idyll of an Idle Summer, Weeks wrote how building canals was “not a sustainable way to use water in Cuatro Ciénegas.”

Biologist W.L. Minckley declares the basin “a single living system — disturb the water, and life itself unravels.”

The lagoons of Cuatro Ciénegas earned Ramsar protection, a global nod to the desert’s hidden ocean of life.

NASA taps Mexican scientists Valeria Souza and Luis Eguiarte to study its microbes — a window into life on early Earth and Mars.

“Just as Minckley predicted,” recalls Souza — analyses revealed the aquifer held traces of the Proto-Pacific, its microbes enduring half a billion years.

International scientists return to study Cuatro Ciénegas’ ancient bacteria, now even more diverse—and find the lagoons shrinking year after year.

Minckley’s words now read like prophecy. Three decades after his warning, Cuatro Ciénegas bears the wounds he foresaw—vanishing groundwater, expanding fields, and unraveling life. His insight endures as an echo of bygone eras and a warning few dared to voice.

Conservationists and water users clash over the last drops of water — protection or survival.

A shift begins: local ejidos let the water flow backward, returning part of their rights to the wetlands—where restoration runs like a current of resistance and hope.