Chapter 1: What caused the formation of the Salton Sea?
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Chapter 2: How did the Salton Sea initially benefit the local community?
There's a lot of ghost towns there. As we'll see, the area was once quite developed. And for good reasons, again, as we'll see, people largely abandoned this area. But let's talk about how the Salton Sea even came to be, because that is an interesting story in and of itself. Yeah, it totally is. It's in the Salton Basin and that's S-A-L-T-O-N, by the way. Right.
And that is a very large trough, just sort of a natural geological trough that that led into at one point the Gulf of California. But it was it was there were other seas before this sea or lakes, if you want to go that route. Yeah, from the oldest I saw is that we have geological evidence of inland seas or lakes, depending on your definition, going back at least 40,000 years.
And that it was almost cyclical. There'd be a lake that was there for a few hundred years, and it would dry up or flow out to the Gulf of California. And then it would happen again a couple centuries later. And the thing that made it happen was the Colorado River, which flows to the east,
along the border of California and Nevada and California and Arizona down into, I guess, the Gulf of California, right? Are you asking me? I think so. So that would make the Colorado River a sea.
But it flows into there, and every once in a while, there's a lot of snow melt, there's a lot of rain, and the Colorado River will flood its banks so much that a bunch of it gets diverted into the Salton Basin, forming one of the Salton Seas over time. Yeah, for a while, like you said. It could be there for a while.
Eventually, it's out in the middle of the desert, so eventually it's going to evaporate. Right. But as the river flowed in there, it carried a lot of silt with it, And eventually that silt gummed up the outlet so it couldn't get anywhere. So there was a natural dam that was formed. And, you know, it was like you said, it was it was a lake for a long time. Sometimes it was a saltwater lake.
Sometimes the heat would dry it out and evaporate it. And it would just become a dry bed once again. And it was this kind of weird geological cycle. I mean, I'm sure this has happened elsewhere, but this seems particularly noteworthy for this area. It does. It seems kind of unique, you know? Yeah, I think so. There's also one of these lakes or seas.
You'll like this one because they call it a lake. Lake Kahuala. which formed about 1,300 years ago, as well as geologists can tell. And it stuck around for hundreds of years, possibly up into the 1500s. And at one point in the 1500s, it flooded. So it was already there. And it grew to about 26 times the size of the Salton Sea. Oh, wow. Which in and of itself, that sounds pretty impressive.
But I came up with a few comparisons for some of our listeners around the world, if I may. Sure. For our northern listeners, that is larger than the size of Lake Erie. Okay. For our Canadian listeners, it's four times larger than the capital city of Ottawa. For our European listeners, that's larger than Belgium. Okay. In the UK, that's bigger than Wales.
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Chapter 3: What environmental issues have arisen at the Salton Sea?
which was fine. They dug it well enough that under normal circumstances, the water was flowing normally. But the year after they dug that bypass, it stayed around longer than expected. And the year after, there were some genuinely abnormal circumstances that caused a huge problem for everybody. Yeah, it rained a lot, a big rainy season.
And then, you know, snow melt in the Rockies can always be a problem if it was extra. And that year it was extra coinciding with those rains. The Colorado River swole up again and it, you know, did what water does. It goes downriver in a pretty impactful way. And really overwhelmed that temporary channel that they were using to divert around the clog canal. Yeah. It carved it.
It just made it bigger and deeper. And eventually it started overflowing into that salt and sink and just became one big body of water. Yeah, so essentially the Colorado River decided, I'll go this way instead. So it actually changed its course from the way that it had been going for millennia to this way directly into the Salton Sea.
And it started flowing so fast that 90,000 cubic feet of water per second was flowing into the Salton Sea, right? That is the size of an Olympic-sized pool, that much water flowing in every second, right? Yeah, and for our friends in the north, that's an Olympic-sized pool. Right. I'm not going to keep going. Well, what about our friends who like McDonald's?
Oh, I mean, if you did a Big Mac conversion, that's really going the extra mile. It is exactly 2,295,918 Big Macs all flowing into the Salton Sea per second. So delicious. It does seem delicious. But imagine them all kind of flowing at once and smacking into another. It would probably get kind of gross. Yeah, pretty gross. So, I mean, that happened for a couple of years.
And they tried to redirect the river. It was a pretty expensive proposition. It was a pretty frantic thing. The U.S. government got involved. The Southern Pacific Railroad got involved. They fully sealed it in 1907. But that's like, what, three years later. And, you know, by that point, it's too late.
They're like, all right, now we got a 400 square mile inland sea or lake, depending on who's podcasting many years from now.
Right.
Yeah, the way that they sealed it, the Union Pacific Railroad, because their lines were threatened, they're like, we better do something because these government yokels have no idea what to do.
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Chapter 4: How has agricultural runoff impacted the Salton Sea's ecosystem?
All right, so when we last left you, human experimentation and sort of error and rain and snowmelt caused a 400-square-mile, almost 35-mile-long and 15-mile-wide earthquake about 30 foot deep on average lake to form in the middle of the California desert.
Because it's where it was, eventually, if humankind had not intruded once again, it probably would have eventually just completely evaporate like it had been doing for millennia. But like we mentioned, that soil is good stuff. So they started to build, you know, farmland out there and irrigate that land. And what do you do when you irrigate stuff? You got to have runoff.
And so they're running this irrigation water off into the lake, which basically it's like, hey, we're putting at least as much water as you're evaporating. So you're not going anywhere. No. Yeah, that's right. So it stabilized the lake indefinitely, just the agricultural runoff.
One of the other things that the other impacts that this had, because they started doing that in the 20s, is that agricultural runoff is chock full of salt, which I didn't realize. But this irrigation produces a lot of salt and that stuff is flowing right into the salting and it turned it salty. And today I saw anywhere between one third or 50 percent more salty than the Pacific Ocean.
The Salton Sea has become because of all that introduction. So it started freshwater and then because of agricultural runoff, it turned into a saltwater inland sea slash lake. That's right. And because it's located along the Pacific Flyway, which is a great migratory bird route, the birds were like, hey, this is great. Now there's water here. The locals were like, we should put some fish in here.
So they stocked it with tilapia, a lot of tilapia. And sport fish for sport fishing. And of course, the birds love that even more. So all of a sudden, by the 1930s, you have a sort of a brand new wildlife refuge forming such that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service even created the Salton Sea Wildlife Refuge to protect all the stuff that was there now.
Yeah, so when the Salton Sea first formed, everybody's like, this is actually kind of great. This is a mistake that turned really wonderful for everybody. We turned river water into lemonade, in other words. That's right. There were some other weird things that didn't make it, but that were introduced. Flamingos, which I guess aren't that weird. But a guy introduced sea lions, too, at one point.
And they were accused of stealing pigs in the area. But the guy who introduced sea lions and flamingos, he had a legendary restaurant out on an island in the middle of the Salton Sea called Mullet Island, which is actually just sitting atop a dormant volcano. It's very important to remember this for later. It's a dormant but not extinct volcano.
It's just kind of sitting there chilling, waiting to go up. That's right. And, you know, once you have flamingos, you're going to have people because people want to go see those flamingos. So by the 1950s, developers had come along and turned it into what they called the California Riviera or the Salton Riviera or Palm Springs by the Sea. And it's exactly what you think. It's tiki bars.
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Chapter 5: What are the health risks associated with the Salton Sea?
Yeah. It's hubris. Yeah. So, yeah, that runoff would sometimes flood the lake. There'd be so much of it. And those developments would flood, like you were saying. The other problem with the runoff is that it's not just salt. It brings lots of pesticides and fertilizers with it. And remember that there was no outlet for this lake, which made it a lake in the first place.
So all of this toxic water... didn't have anywhere to go, right? It just stayed in the lake. And anytime you have a lot of fertilizers introduced into a body of water, especially a warm one, you get algae blooms. You also get bacteria blooms. And when the algae decays, the microbes that eat it also suck up a lot of the oxygen in the water. And that kills off all the stuff that needs that oxygen.
So it creates dead zones. And then even worse, the bacteria that blooms, some kinds of it actually produce toxins that can do things like damage humans' livers or their DNA or cause respiratory failure. So all this stuff is starting to like happen in the Salton Sea starting in the 70s and 80s.
And it's just becoming clear that there's problems that are starting to brew, like literally brewing within the Salton Sea. Yeah, it's called eutrophication. And there are some pretty staggering and very sad statistics that we're going to kind of run through here as far as the die-off.
Because, you know, the fish die-off and then eventually because of the fish die-off, the bird die-off was really massive. This one is fairly staggering. Just over a five-month period from December 91 to April 92, 150,000 little small water birds are called, what are those, eared grebs? Yeah. Is that how we're pronouncing that? I was going to say grebbies, but I think you nailed it.
I'm not really sure, but they're little small water birds, and 150,000 of them died over five months on the Salton Sea. Another 20,000 in 1994. 10,000 white and brown pelicans died out in 1996. Wow. about 10,000 other fish-eating birds. And this is the really sad one, even though it was, I say, only 1,000. That's a lot.
But they were endangered brown pelicans, and apparently that was the largest sort of single die-off of an endangered species to ever happen. Yeah, yeah, and all this is going down on the Salton Sea. Or the tilapia, man. How about that stat? Yeah, the most eye-popping stat that I've found is that 8 million, 8 million tilapia died in one single day in August of 1999.
How did they figure that, you know? I don't know. They must have counted one in like a square foot and then multiplied it by a big mass or something. Yeah, by, well, in this case, fish tacos maybe. Gross. That was probably insensitive. What, fish tacos? Well, I mean, tilapia is good for, I don't eat tilapia much, but it's pretty good for a fish taco. Aren't they the rats of the sea?
Yeah, I think so. I used to eat it more. I'll eat tilapia. I'm not that fancy. Oh. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I'll eat tilapia right in front of you. Well, I'll be dining on my Chilean sea bass.
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Chapter 6: What efforts have been made to restore the Salton Sea?
Right. So things are getting dire here, right? And you can kind of imagine that as things started to go downhill, tourism dropped off. And that happened exactly as you'd think. That North Shore Beach and Yacht Club that was the crown jewel, it closed down in 1984 because there was a flood from agricultural runoff. And then I saw a really cool, eerie picture, Chuck.
There's a drive-in movie theater, again, from back in the day. It's in Bombay Beach. And for some reason, the cars are all parked, like they're there to see the movie, but they're all junked and abandoned, mostly missing wheels. And they just got put there like that. And it looks like everybody just kind of left the Salton Sea mid-movie. It's really cool to see.
I would strongly suggest looking up that picture. I don't remember where I saw it. Well, I'll do you even better. There's a video on YouTube because that's a very I mean, people aren't tourism wise. They're not flocking there.
But people like me and people that are the same kind of people go to like abandoned roller coaster parks, amusement parks will still go to the Salton Sea to kind of check things out. Right. And one of these videos, it's from the gnarly speed shop.
And I think if you just look up abandoned cars that drive in on YouTube, Gnarly Speed Shop, they do a cool video sort of walkthrough of the drive-in and the surrounding area. There's this very, like every picture you see of this, there's a very kind of striking old orange Maverick car sitting in the front of frame because I guess it's kind of closest to the road.
And there was graffiti on it, and I could never tell what it said from the pictures, but on the video I was able to pause it. And it says, you infected me in a way I didn't know was possible, which is very creepy. I don't know if that was like a message to a long lost love or if it was, you know, relating to the Salton Sea and what happened there. But it's a pretty cool video.
And there were boats in the parking lot too. So I don't think like... It just looks like everyone got up in the middle of the movie. I think people just like went and like parked their cars in this abandoned lot is what happened. Sure, sure. Yeah, I know that they didn't do that. It didn't happen that rapidly, but that's what it looks like. I think it's so cool, you know?
I didn't think you thought that. So I remembered where I saw it, Chuck. I saw it on a slideshow on All That's Interesting. Great. Okay, so do you want to take a second break and come back and talk about how it has gotten even worse than what we've said so far? Yeah, let's do it. Okay.
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Chapter 7: How has tourism changed in relation to the Salton Sea?
In 2003, the water districts of Southern California signed off. There was this deal that they had been negotiating for years called the Quantification Settlement Agreement, or QSA. And basically what they were trying to get done was say, hey, let's once again take some of that Colorado River water and ā
The stuff that they've been using for irrigation is now being redirected to like, you know, a lot of the area was then built up into more urban areas in the Coachella Valley and like San Diego. And they're like, well, we want that water now. Right. And in exchange, those areas would say, all right, now what we're going to do is pay the farmers there water.
a lot of money to upgrade their old equipment. It was really inefficient irrigation equipment. The newer versions won't have nearly as much waste water. And so they're like, let's do a trade off here. We'll pay you to upgrade your stuff. And in return, you give us a lot of the water that we need. Right.
So the problem as far as the Salton Sea is concerned, that agricultural runoff, remember, was keeping it going. Yeah. So since there's less irrigation runoff because these irrigation techniques have been vastly updated, there's not really any agricultural runoff coming and feeding the Salton Sea any longer. Right.
And part of that quantification settlement agreement was we need to take some of this water that the Imperial Valley farmers used to use and feed it into the Salton Sea for 15 years. Yeah. They even paid the farmers to leave some of their land fallow so they could direct that water to the Salton Sea. In retrospect, that seems like total madness. They were essentially wasting all of that water.
But it actually turned out to be prescient, even though they didn't quite realize that it was a good thing for there to be water there until we figure out what to do. It's sort of like leaving the water on in your tub with the drain slightly open. Yeah. And just being like, we're just going to leave the tub of water on for 15 years so we can keep this body of water. Yes.
But your tub you got from an abandoned house. Right. And it has bath water that's 100 years old and full of pollutants and algae. And you're just running your water into it. Yeah. So it's a horror movie tub. Yes, exactly. That's exactly what it is. Yeah.
So you might be asking like, hey, if this thing wasn't supposed to be there to begin with, if the whole idea of a body of water out in the middle of the desert like that is just going to dry up naturally, like just let it dry up naturally. And like, what's the big deal? One of the big deals is, is that there's still a lot of biodiversity there. It's not like it killed everything.
It seems like that eventually might happen, but it's still a habitat. It's still a migratory stop for birds on that fly route. And it's because, you know, Southern California has been developed so much, a lot of the other natural habitats for them have gone away. So the Salton Sea was, as sad as it was, was like an oasis for them almost. Right. Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What future plans exist for the Salton Sea and its surrounding areas?
Yeah. Gray Davis, when he was governor in 2003, signed the Salton Sea Restoration Act and the Salton Sea Restoration Fund, but that didn't receive funding. So a fund without funding is not a fund. No. Just like a sea without an outlet is a lake. Right? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. All right.
In 2007, the Corps of Engineers, the Army Corps of Engineers, got authorization to spend up to $30 million on projects. The money was finally appropriated in 2015, and the Obama administration spent a couple of hundred grand is all on a study, another study even. That was the $30 million. That's what it turned out to be from what I can tell.
It went from $30 million to $200,000, and it was for another study. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, I mean, none of this, though, is going to make any difference. I mean, even a $30 million thing, or I think there was one plan, yeah, a 10-year Salton Sea plan to cost $383 million. But that's not even for restoration, because like you said, that ship has sailed.
It is a multi, multi-billion dollar thing if they want to get this thing back to the California Riviera. So it doesn't seem like that's just ever going to happen. It's not even possible. No. So now they're looking at restoring parts of it to turn it back into wetlands for birds. Right. And that 10-year plan, it was estimated to cost $383 million just to do that. Yeah.
And it looked like it was just going to be another pie in the sky proposal that would never get funding. But California came up with something like $200 million of that. They're under Gavin Newsom. In the last couple of years, there's been huge, crazy movements compared to what had been done the last couple of decades. And California came up with $200 million.
Out of nowhere, mind-bogglingly, the federal government shipped in another $240 million, $245. So now this project that needed $383 million has almost half a billion. So not only are they now on the Salton Sea saying, like, you know, when are we ever going to be able to do anything about this, to we can actually do more than we wanted to do in our 10-year plan.
The things are starting to pick up and they're starting to restore wetlands. And it actually looks like it's going to not be quite the ecological disaster that it would have been had California just sat on its hands. Yeah, I think between 2003 and 2016, just a few dozen acres of the wetland were restored. Since then, about 2,000 more.
And the Species Conservation Habitat Project has a plan over the next decade to restore another 9,000 acres. So that'd be like roughly 12,000 acres of restoration, which is pretty good. Um, they also think that, you know, it's Southern California, so it's, it's a, a moneyed area in general.
Um, not that exact area, but they're saying like, Hey, we can like, we've got this great land there that we can make money off still. Uh, remember that mullet Island that's on the dormant volcano. Um, that means there's some hotspots there. And so, uh, some people are saying, Hey, let's, let's put a few billion dollars toward a geothermal electricity plant. Yeah. Um, or maybe mine some lithium.
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