When scuba divers cleaned up all 72 miles of Lake Tahoe’s shoreline, they weren’t just pulling out a whopping 25,000 pounds of trash. Dive teams from Clean Up The Lake (CUTL) were also identifying “hot spots” or areas along the shoreline with high concentrations of litter.
With support from the Tahoe Fund, Tahoe Blue Vodka, and other partners, CUTL divers revisited 20 hot spots on the Nevada shoreline in 2023 to observe changes in litter accumulation and perform surveillance for aquatic invasive species (AIS).
The good news? These 20 hot spots had only 879.5 pounds of submerged litter in 2023, compared to 2,937 pounds of litter during the initial cleanup in 2021. This data suggests that the 72-mile cleanup was a long-lasting, low impact solution for keeping litter out of Lake Tahoe.
The CUTL team is also analyzing data from hot spots on the California side of the lake. Although that analysis has yet to be finalized, results are looking similar to those of the Nevada side, showing that Lake Tahoe is significantly cleaner now than it was in 2021.
Even with such promising results, there’s still more work to be done. During this monitoring project, the CUTL team also conducted deep dive surveys near each hot spot location at 35 and 70-foot depths. These dives revealed that there’s still a high concentration of litter in those deeper zones that will need to be removed as part of a future project.
Photos by Clean Up The Lake
