Wikipedia Wednesday: Salton Sea

I am fascinated by geography.  I am even more fascinated by weird geography.  As such, when I learned about the Salton Sea in California, I was thrilled.  I know this makes me an irredeemable geek and I don't care.  The Salton Sea is crazy-go-nuts and I love it.

Salton Sea

Weird fact 1: it's entirely inland.  Entirely within the state of California, at that.

Weird fact 2: it is 226 feet below sea level.

Weird fact 3: ... here's where it gets really weird.  It is man-made.

Weird fact 4: not only is it man-made, it was made by accident.  What?  Really?  Yes!

The creation of the Salton Sea of today started in 1905, when heavy rainfall and snowmelt caused the Colorado River to swell, overrunning a set of headgates for the Alamo Canal. The resulting flood poured down the canal and breached an Imperial Valley dike, eroding two watercourses, the New River in the west, and the Alamo River in the east, each about 60 miles (97 km) long. These two newly created rivers carried the entire volume of the Colorado River into the Salton Sink, filling it in approximately two years.

The Southern Pacific Railway attempted to fix the diversion of the Colorado, but it was in vain.  The Salton Sea was born, and it wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

So what do you do when you build a sea by accident?  Build some resort towns on it, of course!

The Salton Sea has had some success as a resort area, with Salton City, Salton Sea Beach, and Desert Shores on the western shore and Desert Beach, North Shore, and Bombay Beach built on the eastern shore in the 1950s. The town of Niland is located 2 miles (3 km) southeast of the Sea as well. The evidence of geothermal activity is also visible. There are mud pots and mud volcanoes on the eastern side of the Salton Sea.

"But Matt," you ask, "if Salton Sea was such a hot vay kay spot in the 50's, why don't I hear about it anymore?  Who wouldn't want to check out a mud volcano on their way from Palm Springs to Phoenix?"  First of all, don't ever say "vay kay" again.  Second, the Salton Sea has one critical flaw: no outflow.  This means salt, farm chemicals, and industrial run-off flowing into it just keep building and building and building and ...

 The combined effects of increasing, highly polluted inflows from the New River, Mexico and agricultural runoff have resulted in elevated bacterial levels and large algal blooms in the Salton Sea. With the lack of an outlet, salinity has increased by approximately 1% per year. Due to high selenium levels, the public was strictly advised to limit fish consumption from the Salton Sea in 1986, after which any amount was likely a health risk. Increasing water temperature, salinity and bacterial levels led to massive fish die-offs (1992, 1994, 1996, 1999, 2006, 2008), and created the ideal breeding grounds for avian botulism, cholera and Newcastle disease, which also led to massive avian epizootics from 1992-2008. Currently, the Salton Sea has a salinity of 44 parts per 1000 (ppt), making it saltier than ocean water (35 ppt for Pacific) ...

Dead fish and birds washing up on the shore are a big mood killer for tourists, so not surprisingly the Salton Sea's tourism industry collapsed.  Good news though: the former resort towns have transformed into totally awesome ruins!  If there's one thing I love almost as much as geography, it's archaeological ruins.  Check out Google Maps for a view of a completely abandoned city on the shore of the sea.

What's next for Salton Sea?  California has a plan to save it, which involves reducing its size by 60% over the next 25 years.  There have been numerous proposals over the years, some of which involve piping water to the Gulf of California or the Pacific Ocean to lower the salinity.  This would also provide San Diego with much needed fresh water.

One of these days, I'm going to go on a tour of all the best ghost towns in North America.  I'll definitely hit Salton City and the surrounding area.  I definitely won't be doing any fishing there.