The Salton Sea
Tuesday, 26th July 2005 by Alex Turnbull
This is the Salton Sea an inland 'man-made' salt-lake, located in Southern California. It usually covers a surface area of 974 square kilometres (although it varies a lot), making it the largest lake in California. It was formed in 1905 when heavy rainfall caused the Colorado River to breach a dike, and it took nearly two years to finally control the river’s flow into the Salton Sink and stop the flooding.
Bodies of water which have existed here in the past have always evaporated, but the Salton Sea is constantly replenished by runoff from surrounding agricultural communities, sustaining its water level. Water also flows into the lake at the New River delta, a river which originates 20 miles inside Mexico and consists entirely of wastewater discharged by nearly 1 million inhabitants of the rapidly growing Mexicali Valley.
Unfortunately this has all contributed to the Salton Sea becoming one of the most polluted lakes in the whole of the United States (there's a rather grisly analysis of the situation here).
The high level of selenium in the water contributes to high mortality rates and birth defects in the local bird population, whilst algae starves the fish of oxygen, meaning that it's not uncommon to see thousands of dead fish lining the shore.
All this has (unsurprisingly) taken it's toll on tourism. Here's Salton City, which was founded in the late 50s but failed to develop. You can see the layout of the roads (in fact in hybrid view you can see their names too), but there's hardly any houses at all.
Weirdly, not too far away is an all-dirt, 9-hole golf course called The Sidewinder, that's open all year round for free.
There's loads and loads more information about this area available (as always) at Wikipedia.
Thanks: Cortney Moody, Jeff Alu, Ken Arnold, Pierre-Michel Ricordel
About the author
Alex has decided that his title will be Senior Vice President of Stuff.
This place is absolutely bizarre. A documentary of the area was made, called “Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea”, which I highly recommend. http://www.saltonseadoc.com/
I haven’t been there, but it would be an interesting place to visit.
closer view of the other side of the lake are available on virtualearth.com, just look up coachella, ca, and look SE
I flew into the area on a helicopter and it smells terrible from the salt flats I think. And it was 105+ degrees. Good times.
I have been familiar with the Salton Sea since I was a pre-adolescent, having made many trips from Texas to California. When I was about 11 yrs. old, I became very interested in anything pertaining to the Salton Sea, with its history of many comings and goings; it had at that time seemed to be a very strange, mysterious place. Interestingly enough, during that period, I had a vivid dream that I was standing on the edge of the Salton Sea and a very large creature resembling a sea horse of sorts stood up out of the water; would you believe – some weeks later I read that a movie was being made based on the same premise; it was called “The Monster That Challenged the World” starring Tim Holt, who appeared in many westerns several decades ago. I never saw the movie, though it has run on TV at ungodly hours, but I did read a review of it on the Internet fairly recently. I have not been to the Salton Sea since early in 1969, but I remember the smell, also ungodly, even back then. I’ll have to admit that, as an artist, I find that the area is full of possibilities to do paintings from – Cheryl B. Montoya, Austin, Texas