Geo (Gio) Rutherford

It's one of the biggest bodies of water in the United States.

So we created it by diverting the Colorado River, where then it flowed into the Imperial Valley for, I think it was like four years.

It was like years of water flowing into the Imperial Valley.

But then that eventually got cut off.

And now it's just this body of water that's like slowly evaporating and disappearing.

So there's all these like dried out and completely abandoned kind of beach towns along the edge.

But the bad thing about that and the reason that the salt in the sea, Great Salt Lake are spooky in their death

is because when they die and become these dry salt pans, it's not going to be like Lake Manly, which is this perfectly preserved salty crust.

Instead, it's a salty crust with toxins and arsenic and heavy metals and a lot of nitrate and things that we pump into our farmlands ends up in the Salton Sea and then ends up in that dry basin.

And that ends up...

picking up in the wind and then getting into everybody's lungs.

And so people are breathing in these like agricultural toxins.

And that's how you get these huge cancer rates that spike in the Salton Sea, the Great Salt Lake, the Aral Sea, which is out in Kazakhstan.

They're like years ahead of what we're seeing happen at the Salton Sea.

because the RLC was almost completely drained for agricultural purposes.

And now it's just this like toxic wasteland of dust.

And while we were there at the Salton Sea, we saw so many dust devils because it's like this dry basin.

And so there's all these giant dust devils that are like flying around.

And I was sitting there thinking, man, I am here like, just like all these people who live here, just kind of breathing in this like fine silty dust that's a result of the drying of the Salton Sea.

So that's kind of what makes it spooky to me.