It’s been said that Lake Tahoe is a complex body that man may never understand. That is true; however, UC Davis and Geoff Schladow, the director of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center housed at Sierra Nevada College, are doing their best to prove that statement wrong—well, maybe, just a little bit wrong.

It seems that when experts think they’ve finally arrived at data that absolutely cannot be questioned, that same data is put into conflict with the patterns of human action and natural forces.