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by Benji Soto
2025 - Welcome to Cuatro Ciénegas
by George Grall
1995 - Where lagoons used to teem with fish
Each diverted stream, each deepened well...
...unstitched a thread of life that endured half a billion years.
To the untrained eye, the change came quietly—as if drought were a natural cycle.
But to those who study its waters, this is extinction in slow motion.
The fish are gone.
Reeds and sand took over.
The aquifer breathes shallowly...
...each drop a memory of what once was.
In their reflection, our own survival flickers.
How did we get here?
Tethys sea
The Tethys Sea retreats, leaving behind inland lagoons — a fragment of the primordial ocean, sealed in desert rock.
Industrial settlers
Canals carve through the basin’s veins, turning desert into farmland, and marking the beginning of depletion.
George Weeks
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.”
Professor W.L. Minckley
Biologist W.L. Minckley declares the basin “a single living system — disturb the water, and life itself unravels.”
Ramsar
The lagoons of Cuatro Ciénegas earned Ramsar protection, a global nod to the desert’s hidden ocean of life.
NASA steps in
NASA taps Mexican scientists Valeria Souza and Luis Eguiarte to study its microbes — a window into life on early Earth and Mars.
Souza & Eguiarte
“Just as Minckley predicted,” recalls Souza — analyses revealed the aquifer held traces of the Proto-Pacific, its microbes enduring half a billion years.
Scientists toll the alarm
International scientists return to study Cuatro Ciénegas’ ancient bacteria, now even more diverse—and find the lagoons shrinking year after year.
Echoes of bygone eras
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.
Lines in the sand
Conservationists and water users clash over the last drops of water — protection or survival.
A drop of hope
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.
