Why Is There a Sea in the Middle of California？

In the middle of the California desert, there's a lake nearly twice the size of Lake Tahoe. A lake so big, people call it a sea, but it shouldn't be here at all. The Salton Sea is California's largest lake, but it's artificial. More than that, it's an accident, a beautiful 350 square mile toxic lake that's slowly killing everything around it. But the Salton Sea is here, because in 1905, engineers made what might be the biggest engineering mistake in American history. They lost control of the Colorado River for almost two years, accidentally creating California's largest lake. And for decades, they turned that disaster into paradise. Hollywood celebrities, speedboat races, resort hotels calling it the California Riviera. But then it all went wrong. Today the Salton Sea is dying, and as it dies, it's releasing 120 years of toxic agricultural chemicals into the air that 3 million people breathe. What started as an engineering accident has become an environmental health crisis that keeps getting worse. This is a story of how we created a beautiful disaster in the desert, and why we can't seem to fix it. In 1905, the California Development Company was trying to bring Colorado River water to the Imperial Valley for irrigation. They cut a canal through the Mexican border, thinking they could control one of America's most powerful rivers with wooden headgates and earthen levees. They were catastrophically wrong. In February 1905, the Colorado River broke free. For 16 months, the entire flow of the river, all of it, poured into the Salton Basin. Engineers tried everything, rock barriers, railroad cars full of boulders, even concrete. Nothing worked. The river carved deeper channels every day, taking more water and flowing faster. Entire towns disappeared overnight. The Salton Basin, which had been 270 feet below sea level and bone dry, began filling with water at an astonishing rate. By the time they finally stopped the flow in November 1906, they created an inland sea 45 miles long and 15 miles wide. But here's the thing about accidents in the desert. They don't stay stable. The Salton Sea has no outlet. The only way water leaves is through evaporation. And when water evaporates in the desert, it leaves everything else behind. For 120 years, agricultural runoff has been flowing into this closed basin, bringing with it fertilizers, pesticides, and salt. Lots of salt. The Salton Sea is about twice as salty as the Pacific Ocean and getting saltier every year. For a while, they tried to turn disaster into paradise. Photos from the 1950s look like they're from another planet. This was supposed to be the Palm Springs of water sports. And for 30 years, the Salton Sea seemed like a paradise. Freshwater from agricultural irrigation kept the salinity manageable. Stocked fish thrived in the warm, mineral-rich waters. Millions of birds made it a crucial stop on the Pacific Flyway. The sea was 25% larger than it is today, with pristine beaches and clear blue water. Resort communities sprang up along the shoreline. Salton City, desert shores, Bombay Beach. Developers sold the California Dream, waterfront property in the desert where retirees could fish and tourists could water-ski under endless sunshine. In some of these communities, you can really get a sense of how big the planned developments were. I mean, look at the sheer number of power lines built out behind me. Instead, there's effectively nothing. A handful of homes, maybe, half-abandoned trailers, a bunch of ruins. But obviously, none of the shoreline buildings and hotels that were planned here. But even in the Golden Age, there were warning signs. Fish occasionally died in massive numbers. The smell, when the wind blew wrong, could be overwhelming. Scientists warned that the sea's salinity was rising, that its ecological balance was precarious. But nobody listened. The money was too good. The dream too perfect. I'm at the remains of Bombay Beach. They keep moving this swing set closer to the shoreline as the sea retreats. It's like exploring a post-apocalyptic movie set. There's really cool public art everywhere. But what used to be the Yacht Club in the heyday is now a half-mile from the shoreline. The lake has shrunk that much. The retreat of the sea has exposed what scientists call the barnacle zone, a white ring around the basin marking where the water level used to be. Every year, that ring gets wider as the sea shrinks further. The collapse began in the 1970s and accelerated through the 80s and 90s. And as the sea became saltier, fish populations crashed. Without fish to eat the algae, massive blooms turned the water green and consumed all of the oxygen. Fish die-offs became routine. Not hundreds, but millions of fish floating dead in the summer heat. Then came the day that defied comprehension. In 1999, 7.6 million tilapia died in a single day. 7 million fish, dead in 24 hours. The shoreline turned silver with rotting carcasses that had to be burned around the clock for weeks. The smell was so overwhelming that it could be detected 150 miles away in Los Angeles. The birds that depended on these fish began dying too. The Salton Sea, which had once supported more bird species than anywhere else in California, became a toxic trap. In 1996, more than 10,000 white and brown pelicans died from avian botulism, along with nearly 10,000 other fish-eating birds. Entire rookeries simply disappeared. By 2000, the sea was supporting almost no fish life. The resort towns emptied out as property values collapsed. The smell became so bad that Imperial County declared health emergencies. And still, the sea kept shrinking. But the real crisis was just beginning. This is the bit that most people don't understand. It isn't about the dead lake, it's about what happens when that lake disappears. When water evaporates from the Salton Sea, it leaves behind a toxic cocktail. All concentrated in the dried lake bed that's now blowing across Southern California. This isn't ordinary desert dust. This is 120 years of agricultural runoff baked in the sun and ground into particles fine enough to penetrate human lungs. The Salton Sea lake bed contains some of the highest concentrations of airborne toxins anywhere in America. And it's all becoming airborne. Every day, the sea shrinks a little more, exposing more contaminated sediment to the desert wind. The result is an environmental health crisis affecting 3 million people across the region. Children in nearby communities like here in Salton City have asthma rates nearly three times the national average. Emergency room visits spike every time the dust blows up. Air quality here in the Imperial Valley regularly exceeds federal safety standards, and it's not from cars or factories, it's from a lake that's slowly turning into a toxic dust bowl. And the irony is devastating. The same agricultural productivity that made the Imperial Valley an economic powerhouse is now poisoning the air that farmworkers and their families breathe. And as the resort communities disappeared, they're the only ones still left here. This is where the environmental consequences of our water choices become human consequences. The communities most affected by toxic dust are among California's poorest and most politically powerless — predominantly Latino farmworker communities that don't have the resources to move away, don't have air conditioning to seal out contaminated air, don't have health insurance to deal with respiratory problems. Walk through the mobile home parks and you'll see the adaptations people make when they can't escape environmental disaster. Families monitor the mountains in the distance. If you can't see them clearly through the haze, you know it's a bad air day and the kids stay inside. Meanwhile, all of the fresh water that could help to keep the sea stable gets diverted to wealthier coastal cities. Los Angeles and San Diego get their water rights protected, while rural Imperial County deals with the environmental consequences. The people who contributed least to the problems suffer most from the effects, while those with the most resources insulate themselves from the consequences. But there's an even stranger twist to this story. Remember the pupfish from our last video? Those tiny ancient fish that survive in conditions that would kill almost anything else? The Salton Sea, despite being a toxic wasteland for most species, has become an important refuge for the desert pupfish. As natural desert springs dry up and agricultural development destroys their historic habitat, desert pupfish have found sanctuary in the hypersaline pools around the Salton Sea. They're literally thriving in water too salty and too polluted for almost any other fish species. It's a conservation paradox, an environmental disaster that's accidentally saving an endangered species. The same conditions that are destroying everything else—extreme salinity, high temperatures, toxic runoff—are creating the perfect habitat for one of North America's most specialized fish. But even this success story is fragile. As the sea continues to shrink, these crucial refuge pools could disappear within decades. We might be watching both the salvation and the extinction of the desert pupfish playing out in the same toxic waters. The pupfish remind us that desert ecosystems are more interconnected than we ever imagined. Save one habitat, lose another. Fix one problem, create three more. Every environmental decision in the desert has consequences we don't see coming. But this isn't a story without hope. At the southern end of the Salton Sea, crews are working around the clock to build what California is calling the Species Conservation Habitat Project. This is one of the largest habitat restoration projects in American history, and it's essentially a massive admission of guilt. California might eventually build almost 9,000 acres of managed wetlands using a complex system of pumps, canals, and berms to create artificial habitat as the natural sea disappears. The engineering is actually incredibly impressive. They're mixing new river water with Salton Sea water to get the right salinity mix for wildlife. They're creating new islands and peninsulas for nesting birds. They're installing wind barriers to help keep the dust down when the winds start to rip across the lake. Engineers are essentially building a fake ecosystem from scratch. Artificial wetlands with precisely controlled water levels. Manufactured islands designed by computer models. Berms and channels that mimic natural hydrology, but depend entirely on pumps and human management. The project will create habitat for some birds, reduce some dust emissions, and buy some time. But here's what gets me. We're spending a quarter of a billion dollars to artificially recreate what we accidentally destroyed when we created the Salton Sea in the first place. We're using 21st century engineering to fix a 20th century engineering disaster. All while knowing that the fundamental problem, too much salt, too little water, remains unsolved. The project will help, but it's essentially a very expensive band-aid on a wound that requires major surgery. Without new sources of fresh water, the Salton Sea will keep shrinking. The dust will keep blowing. The environmental health crisis will continue. The Salton Sea's neighbor is one of America's most successful national parks, Joshua Tree. From the peaks in the park, you can look across the desert toward the Salton Sea and see the full scope of what we're dealing with. Not one environmental crisis, but a preview of our future if we don't learn to make better choices. Joshua Tree National Park represents everything we did right about desert conservation. We set aside 800,000 acres of the most spectacular desert landscape in North America and protect it before development could destroy it. We created visitor infrastructure that lets millions of people experience the desert without damaging it. We've maintained wilderness areas where desert ecosystems can function exactly as they have for thousands of years. But Joshua Tree also shows us how fragile that success really is. Temperatures are rising well beyond what these trees are able to tolerate. The trees that give this park its name might not survive the next century here. Urban development creeps closer to park boundaries every year. Water rights battles threaten the springs that sustain desert wildlife. And now we face political threats that could undo decades of conservation progress. When politicians talk about unleashing American energy by opening protected lands to drilling and mining, they're making the same mistake we made in 1905. Assuming we can engineer our way out of any problem, that economic benefits today are worth environmental costs tomorrow. The Salton Sea is what happens when we make short-term decisions about long-term landscapes, when we prioritize economic development over ecological stability, when we assume technology can fix the problems technology creates. Looking out toward the Salton Sea from Joshua Tree, you're seeing two possible visions for the American West. One where we learn to live within natural limits, and one where we didn't. The Salton Sea teaches us that there are no isolated ecosystems and no consequences that stay contained. The agricultural policies that created this crisis were made by people that never imagined they would have created a health crisis for three million people. The water diversions that are hastening the sea's collapse are made by politicians who will never have to breathe in the toxic dust. But the most important lesson of the Salton Sea isn't about water policy or agricultural runoff. It's about time. Environmental problems that develop over decades or centuries can't be fixed with quick technological solutions. The damage we do to natural systems often becomes irreversible, long before we fully understand what we've done. We created the Salton Sea by accident in 1905. We turned it toxic through decades of bad environmental choices. And now we're learning some mistakes are so big that even quarter-billion-dollar restoration projects can't fix them. The dust from the Salton Sea is blowing right now, carrying with it 120 years of accumulated mistakes. In a few hours, some of these particles will reach Los Angeles. By tomorrow, they could be in Arizona or Nevada. Environmental disasters don't respect human boundaries. The question isn't whether we can fix the Salton Sea, it's whether we can learn from it before we make the next one. As the sun sets behind the mountains, casting long shadows across both the preserved wilderness of Joshua Tree and the toxic wasteland of the Salton Sea, we're standing at a crossroads. We can choose to protect what we still have, or we can keep making the same mistakes that created California's beautiful disaster. The choice is ours, but the time to make it is running out, one evaporated acre at a time.