Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea

In 1905, an engineering mistake created a brand new 400-square-mile sea (lake?) in the California desert. People made the most of it at first, but it didn’t take long to become a toxic brew that now threatens the health of anyone in breathing distance. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:46Josh Clark?

  Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. It's a little bit of a Jazzy Earth Science edition, I think.

• 1:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I mean, we might as well get into it, because I just told Jerry the name of this was Salton Lake.

• 2:05Speaker 05

  And even though it's called the Salton Sea.

• 2:08Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 2:09Speaker 05

  Which is a, it's an inland lake in Imperial and Coachella Valleys in Riverside and Imperial County in California, Southern California, but, and I said, it's not really a sea. And you said, it's an endless sea. Then you said, save it.

• 2:24Josh Clark?

  And so this is gold. I didn't say save it like that.

• 2:28Speaker 05

  Well, no, I mean, I'm not gonna do my Josh impression.

• 2:32Josh Clark?

  You just did a really mean Josh impression. Save it.

• 2:35Speaker 05

  Uh, no, no, no. So I guess we need to determine this. Why do they call it a sea?

• 2:41Josh Clark?

  I mean, it's an inland sea. I don't know. I just know that most people call it that. I failed to go look up whether it is a sea or a lake.

• 2:49Speaker 05

  I mean, I don't think it has any outlet to the ocean anymore, right?

• 2:54Josh Clark?

  No, not anymore. We're gonna talk about that.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  Well, that makes it a lake.

• 2:57Josh Clark?

  Save it.

• 2:58Speaker 05

  I think that's, see, I nailed it. I think that's the difference between a sea and a lake. I think a lake has no outlet to the, to the ocean and a sea does.

• 3:07Josh Clark?

  Oh.

• 3:08Speaker 05

  If I'm not mistaken. I might be wrong about that. I didn't look it up, but.

• 3:12Josh Clark?

  I think California has a lot of work to do. They need to go rewrite all of their pamphlets and update their websites and all that stuff. It's now the Salton Lake.

• 3:20Speaker 05

  Well, now all their pamphlets just say, don't even bother coming here.

• 3:24Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 3:25Speaker 05

  To the Salton Sea, that is, not California. I love California.

• 3:27Josh Clark?

  Exactly. And the reason that they would have pamphlets that say, don't come here, is because the Salton Sea is a genuine ecological disaster.

• 3:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:38Josh Clark?

  Human made it every step of the way. And it's got a really interesting history, too. It's just a good all around topic, if you ask me. Plus, it was a so-so movie starring Val Kilmer back in the, you know, late 90s or early 2000s.

• 3:54Speaker 05

  I think it was early 2000s. It was okay. I saw it.

• 3:57Josh Clark?

  The, the extra supporting character was Meth.

• 4:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. It was very messy. Uh, yeah, I've been here, by the way.

• 4:07Josh Clark?

  I was wondering that.

• 4:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, on, on my big out west trip many years ago after college where I spent several months driving around with my best friend Brett. We went through the Salton Sea and it wasn't great back then. I imagine it's, well, it sounds like it's even worse now, but when did we talk about this before? Was it desertification?

• 4:27Josh Clark?

  Oh, maybe.

• 4:29Speaker 05

  Cause I know we've talked about.

• 4:30Josh Clark?

  That doesn't ring a bell.

• 4:32Speaker 05

  But I mean, so much so that I was convinced we did a whole episode, but it, it could have been one of our ill conceived videos that we used to do.

• 4:40Josh Clark?

  That's possible too, because I think I could see us taking the angle that there were ghost towns there.

• 4:46Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 4:47Josh Clark?

  You know?

• 4:47Speaker 05

  Maybe it's ghost towns.

• 4:48Josh Clark?

  There are. 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, let's talk about how the Salton Sea even came to be because that is an interesting story in and of itself.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, it totally is. Uh, it's in the Salton Basin and that's S A L T O N, by the way.

• 5:11Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 5:11Speaker 05

  And that is a, a very large trough, uh, 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.

• 5:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah. From the oldest I saw is that we have geological evidence of inland seas or lakes, depending on your definition, um, going back at least 40,000 years and that it was almost cyclical. There'd be a, 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 of centuries later. And the thing that made it happen was the Colorado River, which flows to the east along the border of California, Nevada and California and Arizona down into, uh, I guess the Gulf of California, right?

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Are you asking me?

• 6:04Josh Clark?

  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.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, for a while, like you said, you know, it could be there for a while. Eventually it's out in the middle of the desert, so eventually it's going to evaporate.

• 6:30Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 6:31Speaker 05

  But as the river flowed in there, it carried a lot of silt with it.

• 6:36Speaker 05

  And eventually that silt gummed up the outlet, so it couldn't get anywhere. So there was a natural dam that was formed.

• 6:42Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  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 just, 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.

• 7:06Josh Clark?

  It does. It seems kind of unique, you know?

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think so.

• 7:10Josh Clark?

  Uh, it, uh, there's also one of these lakes or seas, you'll like this one because they call it a lake. Lake, Lake Kahuluiwa, 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.

• 7:37Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 7:37Josh Clark?

  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.

• 7:45Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 7:46Josh Clark?

  For our northern listeners, that is larger than the size of Lake Erie.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 7:51Josh Clark?

  For our Canadian listeners, it's four times larger than the capital city of Ottawa. Uh, for our European listeners, that's larger than Belgium.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 8:01Josh Clark?

  In the UK, that's bigger than Wales. In Australia, that's two times the greater Sydney metro area. And for our friends in California, that's 26 times the size of the Salton Sea.

• 8:15Speaker 05

  Wow. You did your homework.

• 8:17Josh Clark?

  I did.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  Is there a program that you use, like just like joshconverts.com?

• 8:23Josh Clark?

  There are, yeah, I make like $12 a month on web ads.

• 8:28Speaker 05

  That's great.

• 8:29Josh Clark?

  No, there's, there's websites that says like, they're called like the size of or something like that. So usually it's type in what's the size of 10,000 square miles, which is what that would be.

• 8:40Speaker 05

  Is the landing page just a banana?

• 8:43Josh Clark?

  Yes.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  It starts from there?

• 8:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Where did that come from, using a banana for scale? Do you know?

• 8:49Speaker 05

  Oh, I don't know. I never, I mean, who starts any of these things?

• 8:52Josh Clark?

  Okay. I didn't know if it was something that you had kind of brought up or something. Cause I know the stuff you should know, Army is crazy for that.

• 8:58Speaker 05

  No, it's just an internet thing, you know?

• 9:00Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 9:01Speaker 05

  It's Ron, Ron's doing all of that stuff.

• 9:03Josh Clark?

  Get all Ron. He comes up with the best memes.

• 9:08Speaker 05

  All right. So that was the, the cycle for thousands of years, depositing that silt. One of the byproducts of that is it made that soil very rich and, and stuff could really grow on it if it rained ever, which it doesn't. So that was a problem and irrigation is going to solve that problem. So in the early 1900s, the Imperial Canal was built to say, hey, let's divert some of that Colorado river toward us. So we can have drinking water and so we can irrigate this rich, rich soil that lies beneath our feet.

• 9:42Josh Clark?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:42Speaker 05

  And they completed it and you know, it was, uh, pretty good, but that same silt is going to keep clogging up even, you know, kind of any moving body of water. And that eventually happened to the canal, like in a bad way, not too long after they opened it.

• 9:56Josh Clark?

  No, just in a couple of years. And this one clog was so bad that they were like, we're not going to get rid of this anytime soon. So they dug a bypass around it, you know?

• 10:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:07Josh Clark?

  Which makes sense, it's smart, and they just expected it to last like a couple of months until they cleaned that silt deposit out and could go back to the original canal. The problem was, because they thought it was going to be temporary, they didn't install the proper headgates. Headgates control the flow of water in a canal. So that means that the water in that bypass was literally out of control, 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.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  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 swol 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.

• 11:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Speaker 05

  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.

• 11:27Josh Clark?

  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 Salt and Sea. And it started flowing so fast that 90,000 cubic feet of water per second was flowing into the Salt and Sea, right? That is the size of an Olympic-sized pool, that much water flowing in every second.

• 11:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, and for our friends in the north, that's an Olympic-sized pool.

• 12:01Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 12:03Speaker 05

  I'm not gonna keep going.

• 12:04Josh Clark?

  Well, what about our friends who like McDonald's?

• 12:06Speaker 05

  Oh, I mean, if you did a Big Mac conversion, that's really going the extra mile.

• 12:11Josh Clark?

  It is exactly 2,295,918 Big Macs all flowing into the Salt and Sea per second.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  So delicious.

• 12:21Josh Clark?

  It does seem delicious, but imagine them all kind of flowing at once and smacking into one another and probably get kind of gross.

• 12:28Speaker 05

  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 US 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.

• 12:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the way that they sealed it, the Union Pacific Railroad, because their lines were threatened, they were like, we better do something because these government yokels have no idea what to do. And so apparently it took two, they built a trestle across the river to install a dam made of 2,057 carloads of rock, 221 carloads of gravel, and 203 carloads of clay, all dumped into one spot to finally fill that breach. That's what it took. That's how big of a breach it was.

• 13:26Speaker 05

  How many Big Macs?

• 13:28Josh Clark?

  A lot. I didn't do that one. Sorry.

• 13:32Speaker 05

  It's okay.

• 13:35Speaker 05

  Should we take a break now or is that a, should we, it seems like a good time for a break?

• 13:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the Salt and Sea is now there. The breach has been sealed and people are saying, what the heck are we gonna do with this?

• 13:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're gonna water ski eventually. So we'll come back and talk about that right after this.

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• 15:07Josh Clark?

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• 17:35Speaker 05

  All right, so when we last left you, human experimentation and sort of error and rain and snow melt caused a 400-square-mile, almost 35-mile-long and 15-mile-wide, about 30-foot-deep-on-average lake to form in the middle of the California desert.

• 17:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  Because it's where it was, eventually, if humankind had not intruded once again, it probably would have eventually just completely evaporated, like it had been doing for millennia.

• 18:07Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  But like we mentioned, that soil is good stuff. So they started to build farmland out there and irrigate that land. And what do you do when you irrigate stuff? You've 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.

• 18:32Josh Clark?

  No, yeah, that's right. So it stabilized the lake indefinitely, just the agricultural runoff.

• 18:39Josh Clark?

  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 irrigation produces a lot of salt. And that stuff is flowing right into the Salton, and it turned it salty. Today, I saw anywhere between one-third or 50% 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.

• 19:14Speaker 05

  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 US Fish and Wildlife Service even created the Salton Sea Wildlife Refuge to protect all the stuff that was there now.

• 19:51Josh Clark?

  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.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 20:04Josh Clark?

  So 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.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  That's right. And, you know, once you have flamingos, you're gonna 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, it's restaurants, had a very Palm Springs-y vibe. Like, you know, Elvis performed there, Frank Sinatra performed there. They had, you know, I wasn't kidding about the water skiing. They, people yotted, people swam. It was just a big recreation area out there in the middle of the desert in, you know, Southern California. They were like, yeah, we'll take another one of these. We got plenty of people around.

• 21:22Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 21:22Speaker 05

  And Palm Springs gets a little crowded. So now we have this, this beautiful inland sea lake.

• 21:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, people started building vacation homes there. There were very famous speedboat races that were held there every year. At one point, some developers sunk $2 million in 1960 money into building the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, which became basically the crown jewel of the Salton Sea area. There were postcards that said, greetings from the Salton Sea. There was a Bombay Beach resident who's quoted-

• 21:53Speaker 05

  Wait, they had postcards?

• 21:54Josh Clark?

  They had postcards. Swear to God.

• 21:56Speaker 05

  Did they sell shot glasses?

• 21:57Josh Clark?

  I, uh, yes. There was, there was a Spencer's Gifts on, on the Salton Sea in the 60s.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  All right.

• 22:05Josh Clark?

  You could also get a bitchin' Grateful Dead poster and a Latoya Jackson and lingerie poster.

• 22:11Speaker 05

  Right. Is she in a Lambo?

• 22:16Josh Clark?

  No, that's Garfield.

• 22:17Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 22:18Josh Clark?

  So there was this Bombay Beach resident, which is one of the little party towns on the Salton Sea. And it's still there. There's something like 350 people that live there. But he said back in the day, it was like a spring break party all the time. The problem was the Salton Sea, as much fun as people were having on it, it was this ticking environmental time bomb just growing underneath there, water skis essentially, day by day. Until finally in around the 70s, it became clear that the Salton Sea's glitz was starting to wear off and there was rotten Big Macs underneath.

• 22:54Speaker 05

  You know, I thought you were gonna lead it in with when you said the problem is, I thought you were gonna say, is it spring break is not meant to last forever?

• 23:01Josh Clark?

  Oh, that's a great one. Yeah, let's go back and edit that in.

• 23:04Speaker 05

  Just a, just a note.

• 23:05Josh Clark?

  Okay, what we, there'll be no context. You'll just add it in and then we'll leave the part where you suggested into.

• 23:11Speaker 05

  I agree. Uh, yeah. So, yeah, things would go downhill pretty quickly. Uh, you know, I hope we've hammered home enough that this thing just sort of appeared because of people. And it's out in the middle of the desert and it's not supposed, it wasn't supposed to be there really. So obviously it's not gonna rain. Um, so that's not gonna fill that thing back up. They had that agricultural runoff for many years, but as we'll see, that would end up being a big part of the problem. Developments would flood, uh, you know, cause they were building, you know, lakeside properties and stuff like that. So, uh, you know, whenever you try to intrude, I feel like and build a big natural thing out where there probably wasn't supposed to be one. I feel like it usually goes south like this in some way.

• 23:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's hubris.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 23:55Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:19Josh Clark?

  And anytime you have a lot of, um, 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, that bacteria that blooms, um, 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 seventies and eighties.

• 25:03Josh Clark?

  And it's, it's just becoming clear that there's problems that are starting to brew, like literally brewing within the Salton Sea.

• 25:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a, it's called eutrophication and there are some pretty staggering and very sad statistics that we're gonna kind of run through here as far as the die off because. Uh, you know, the fish die off and then eventually because of the fish die off, the bird die off. It was really massive. Um, this one is, is fairly staggering. Just over a five month period from December 91 to April 92, 150,000 uh, little small water birds are called, what are those? Eared grebs?

• 25:39Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 25:41Speaker 05

  Is that what, is that how we're pronouncing that?

• 25:43Josh Clark?

  I was gonna say grebby's, but I think you nailed it.

• 25:46Speaker 05

  I'm not really sure, but they're little, small water birds and 150,000 of them died over five months.

• 25:50Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  On the Salton Sea. Another 20,000 uh, in 94, um, 10,000 white and brown pelicans, uh, died out in 1996, uh, about 10,000 other fish eating birds. And this is the really sad one, even though it was, I say only a thousand, 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.

• 26:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah. And all this is going down on the Salton Sea.

• 26:21Speaker 05

  Or the tilapia, man. How about that stat?

• 26:23Josh Clark?

  Yeah. The most eye popping stat that I've found is that eight million, eight million tilapia died in one single day in August of 1999.

• 26:36Speaker 05

  How do they figure that, you know?

• 26:38Josh Clark?

  I don't know. They must've counted one in like a square foot and then multiplied it by Big Macs or something.

• 26:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. But well, in this case, fish tacos, maybe.

• 26:47Josh Clark?

  Gross.

• 26:50Speaker 05

  That was probably insensitive.

• 26:52Josh Clark?

  What? Fish tacos?

• 26:53Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, tilapia is good for, I don't eat tilapia much, but it's pretty good for a fish taco.

• 26:57Josh Clark?

  Aren't they the rats of the sea?

• 26:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think so. I, I used to eat it more.

• 27:02Josh Clark?

  I'll eat tilapia. I'm not that fancy.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  Oh, oh, yeah?

• 27:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah. I'll eat tilapia right in front of you.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  Uh, well, I'll, I'll be dining on my Chilean sea bass.

• 27:13Josh Clark?

  Nice.

• 27:14Speaker 05

  What was that called? It was something toothfish, right? Didn't they rename it for marketing?

• 27:18Josh Clark?

  Patagonian toothfish. I forgot about that. That's the real name for sea bass.

• 27:22Speaker 05

  That's right. Suckers.

• 27:24Josh Clark?

  So, yes, again, I think it's worth restating. Eight million tilapia died in a single day in 1999. The previous record before that had been set the summer prior. And that was 500,000 that died on a single day. So clearly, things are getting worse by the year at the Salton Sea by the time the 90s roll around.

• 27:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so, I mean, they were running incinerators around the clock, around town, because, you know, the smell of fish carcass was everywhere. And you had all these, very sadly, all these animal bodies all over the place. I guess you could call them carcasses, but I'm gonna say bodies.

• 28:03Josh Clark?

  So there's another, there's an explanation for this too, and it's actually pretty simple. In addition to those, the eutrophication dead zones that are produced by those algae blooms, just simple summertime heat in a really saline body of water can kill fish en masse. And that's exactly what was going on. As the Salton Sea warmed, as summer started to kind of get going, and there's like 105-degree August temperatures, hot water, warm water, carries less oxygen than cooler water. And salt water carries less oxygen than fresh water. So when you have warm, briny water, fish can suffocate, and that's what was happening.

• 28:47Josh Clark?

  And so fish die-offs are just an annual part of life around the Salton Sea.

• 28:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I mean, not only that, it's just losing surface area. It's shrinking. So 10% has been lost in recent years. They're projecting 40% by 2030. And when that's happening in a really salty area, and all those pesticides and metals and everything that have been, you know, deposited over the years due to the agriculture all around, it just makes it more concentrated. And it's just, you know, it's a bad scene. It's getting just saltier over the years. It's getting more, you know, chock full of more densely packed pesticides and things. And they're saying that the salinity is probably gonna increase another, maybe three times in the next 10 years, basically kind of taking care of anything else that might still be living there.

• 29:35Josh Clark?

  Right. And just from the fact that it's shrinking too, I saw that there's houses that were built along the shoreline back in the heyday that are now like a football field away from the shoreline now. That's how much it's shrunk. And they expect it's going to shrink another 40% by 2030. 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.

• 30:18Josh Clark?

  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're just, 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.

• 30:47Speaker 05

  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

• 31:03Speaker 05

  roller coaster parks, amusement parks. We'll still go to the Salton Sea to kind of check things out.

• 31:09Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 31:09Speaker 05

  And one of these videos, it's from the gnarly speed shop. And I think if you just look up abandoned cars at 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, you know, kind of closest to the road.

• 31:35Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 31:36Speaker 05

  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 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 movie. I think people just like went and like parked their cars in this abandoned lot is what happened.

• 32:05Josh Clark?

  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?

• 32:12Speaker 05

  I didn't think you thought. I didn't think you thought that.

• 32:14Josh Clark?

  So I remembered where I saw it, Chuck. I saw it on a slideshow on All That's Interesting.

• 32:20Speaker 05

  Great.

• 32:21Josh Clark?

  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?

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 32:29Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 32:42Josh Clark?

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• 34:21Josh Clark?

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• 35:39Josh Clark?

  Okay Chuck, so the Salton Sea has really gone downhill. There's no denying it. People have decamped from there, not just vacationers, but people who lived there too, just moved away because it's gotten so gross. We didn't mention it, but one of the things that happened, I think, I don't remember what year it was, there was a sulfur dioxide cloud that wafted basically all across Southern California, all the way to Los Angeles. And it stunk like rotten eggs and they traced it back to the Salton Sea. It was all of the decomposition of all the muck, all the dead fish, all the everything. It was so bad that you could smell it all over Southern California. So this is the state of the Salton Seas.

• 36:23Josh Clark?

  People are like, we need to do something about this. And for years and years, starting in the early, late 90s, early 2000s, the idea was, let's just restore it to its former glory. And that idea became a non-starter essentially for the next couple of decades because it's just a bad idea. You can't do it now. It's too late. But it took a while for the California government to figure that out.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, we'll talk about a bunch of the stops and starts over the years. 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 the 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 the stuff that they had been using for irrigation is now being redirected to like, you know, a lot of that 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.

• 37:29Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  And in exchange, those areas would say, all right, now what we're going to do is pay the farmers there a lot of money to upgrade their old equipment. It was really inefficient irrigation equipment. The newer versions won't have nearly as much wastewater. 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.

• 37:55Josh Clark?

  Right. So the problem as far as the Salton Sea is concerned, that agricultural runoff, remember, was keeping it going.

• 38:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:03Josh Clark?

  So since there's less irrigation runoff, because these irrigation techniques have been vastly updated, there's no, not really any agricultural runoff coming and feeding the Salton Sea any longer. 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.

• 38:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:29Josh Clark?

  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.

• 38:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 38:39Josh Clark?

  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.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  It's sort of like leaving the water on in your tub with the drain slightly open.

• 38:56Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 38:56Speaker 05

  And just being like, we're just going to leave the tub water on for 15 years so we can keep this body of water.

• 39:02Josh Clark?

  Yes, but your tub you got from an abandoned house.

• 39:06Speaker 05

  Right.

• 39:06Josh Clark?

  And it had, it has bath water that's 100 years old and full of pollutants and algae. And you're just running your water into it.

• 39:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. So it's a horror movie tub.

• 39:16Josh Clark?

  It's a, yes, exactly. That's exactly what it is.

• 39:19Speaker 05

  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? Um, 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, that fly route.

• 39:48Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 39:49Speaker 05

  Uh, 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 a, an oasis for them almost.

• 40:02Josh Clark?

  Right, yeah. Um, that, that is sad because if the Salton Sea is the more attractive option because that's all that's left.

• 40:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:09Josh Clark?

  Those poor, poor birds are in trouble.

• 40:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 40:11Josh Clark?

  Uh, it's not just the birds that are in trouble, there are people that still live around there. Uh, in fact, I was really surprised to find the Salton City, uh, which I believe is the biggest town along the Salton Sea. It's on the Northwest Shore. Their population actually increased since the 2020 census by almost a thousand people.

• 40:29Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 40:29Josh Clark?

  A thousand people, who cares? Well, they were less than 6,000 in population, uh, at the time of the 2020 census. So people are moving there because the housing is so affordable, it's insane. Um, so there's people there, there's, there's, in the whole region, there's something like 650,000 people. And all of those people are at tremendous risk right now of a, a cornucopia of health hazards that are starting to develop because of the Salton Sea evaporates more and more and more because the runoff isn't sustaining it anymore and it's so hot. That exposed seabed or lake bed that's so chock full of toxins that you can barely

• 41:11Josh Clark?

  look at it is turning to dust that's getting blown off into the surrounding areas and causing all sorts of problems.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, asthma, they've already found an uptick in asthma. Um, there's a, a doctor named Jill Johnson, a PhD. Who's an assistant professor of preventative medicine at, uh, Southern Cal. And she's working on a research project called the Salt and Sea in Children's Health, colon, assessing Imperial Valley respiratory health and environment, and the environment, along with partner Shoray Farzan, another PhD. And they're basically following elementary school children in that area and seeing how their health is advancing. And right now, pretty bad asthma rates and they haven't proved causation yet, but it seems like it's probably headed that way.

• 42:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah, apparently they just, like this month, published an article on their findings from this in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, you know, that rag.

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:13Josh Clark?

  And it basically is like, this is, yes, this is causing asthma, at the very least, in little kids. There's all sorts of other stuff to worry about, too, because there's metals, pesticides, DDT's been found in there. There's just so much crud in there that now that it's drying up, is turning into dust and getting carried as particulate matter, that you don't, you don't want to breathe that stuff in, and yet it's just blowing around. Because again, now that's turned into desert, but it's toxic desert.

• 42:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that's, that's just like health issues. There's also like a financial impact. There was a study about, oh, 11 years ago or so, from the Pacific Institute, they're a think tank in Oakland that deals with water policy. And they said the financial toll could be as much as $70 billion over the next 30 years.

• 43:05Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 43:06Speaker 05

  Like property values, like you said, going south, public health, which we've mentioned, the continued loss of recreational revenue and natural habitat. So, you know, there's a big financial burden. So, you know, obviously because of that, California, over the past, like, you know, 25 years, has had various stops and starts with funding for different projects that'll get approved, and then the money just gets diverted or never shows up.

• 43:31Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and especially before that 2014 study from the Pacific Institute, people are like, this $8 billion seems like a little much to restore the Salton Sea. One of the reasons why is because the area that the Salton Sea is in, the people who live around it are fairly low income, it's a very rural area, and a lot of the people who are affected live in Mexico. So back in Sacramento, the capital of California, which is pretty far away from the Salton Sea.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:04Josh Clark?

  The political will just hasn't been there. And one of the things you could do, if you were a senator, a congressperson, a governor, you could fully go after a bunch of funds to save the Salton Sea and remediate the area and get it back to its former glory. And then your legislature would say, no, we're not funding that. And you'd be like, oh, man, I tried. And that seems like what the pattern was for the first, like about 20-ish years, maybe a little more than that, that people started coming up with ideas to do something about this.

• 44:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, Gray Davis, when he was governor in 2003, signed the Salton Sea, sorry, Restoration Act and the Salton Sea Restoration Fund, but that didn't receive funding. So a fund without funding is not a fund.

• 44:49Josh Clark?

  No.

• 44:51Speaker 05

  Just like a sea without an outlet is a lake.

• 44:55Speaker 05

  Right?

• 44:56Josh Clark?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 44:57Speaker 05

  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.

• 45:16Josh Clark?

  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?

• 45:25Speaker 05

  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, uh, yeah, a 10-year Salt and Sea Plan, uh, to cost 383 million. But that's not even for restoration because like you said, that ship has sailed. Um, it, it is a multi, multi-billion dollar thing if they want to get this thing back to the California Riviera.

• 45:50Josh Clark?

  So Right.

• 45:50Speaker 05

  It, it doesn't seem like that's just ever going to happen. It's not even possible.

• 45:53Josh Clark?

  No. So now they're looking at restoring parts of it to turn it back into wetlands for birds.

• 45:59Speaker 05

  Right.

• 45:59Josh Clark?

  And that 10-year plan, it was, um, estimated to cost 383 million dollars just to do that.

• 46:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 46:07Josh Clark?

  And it looked like it was just going to be another, another pie in the sky, a proposal that would never get funding. Uh, but California came up with something like 200 million dollars of that. They're under, um, Gavin Newsom, uh, in the last couple of years, there's been huge, crazy movements compared to what had been done in the last couple of decades. And California came up with 200 million dollars, uh, out of nowhere, mind bogglingly, the federal government shipped in another 240 million dollars, 245. So now this project that needed 383 million has almost half a billion. So not only are they now on the Salt and Sea saying like, you know, when, when are we ever going to be able to do anything about this to?

• 46:51Josh Clark?

  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, um, it, 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.

• 47:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. I think, uh, between 2003 and 2016, um, just a few dozen acres of the wetland were restored. Uh, since then, about 2,000 more. And, uh, 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. They also think that, you know, it's Southern California, so it's a moneyed area in general. 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. Remember that mullet island that's on the dormant volcano? That means there's some hotspots there.

• 47:53Speaker 05

  And so some people are saying, hey, let's, let's put a few billion dollars toward a geothermal electricity plant.

• 48:00Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 05

  Or maybe mine some lithium.

• 48:03Josh Clark?

  Yes, I believe they're already building the plants there. And then the lithium, I don't know if they've actually started that, but there's a lot of lithium there. And that is like 21st century gold. Cause you use that in batteries for electric vehicles, for giant batteries to back up your power grid. And there's a push and pull over whether to lithium mine there. And of course they're going to end up lithium mining there because it's just so valuable. But some people are like, it's already an environmental catastrophe. Who cares if lithium mining makes it a little bit worse? It's better than mining in a more pristine area and really screwing that up. And other people are like, no, we're trying to restore it. So lithium mining is gonna not only undo that stuff, it's gonna make it even worse than it was.

• 48:48Josh Clark?

  But my money is definitely on them lithium mining.

• 48:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, agreed.

• 48:54Josh Clark?

  There's a couple of other things that are noteworthy about the Salton Sea. I guess we can leave that part that there's actually hope for it right now. But along the way, like you can imagine such a bizarre place generated some really interesting urban legends over the years, right?

• 49:11Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:11Josh Clark?

  Some of them are actually true. The Navy used to use the Salton Sea to drop test bombs or dummy bombs to basically train their bomber pilots how to drop bombs. And they actually supposedly practiced for atomic bomb drops. And they are, so there's dummy bombs under the Salton Sea still. And of course locals are like, that's just a cover story. They actually lost an atomic bomb and that's what's hiding there. There's an undetonated atomic bomb under there.

• 49:40Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 49:40Josh Clark?

  There are a bunch of Navy planes that did crash. I think 18 flyers died over the years, but there's 24 planes sunken in the Salton Sea right now. And then there's this one really weird legend that predates the Salton Sea.

• 49:56Josh Clark?

  It's the lost ship of the desert. Have you ever heard of that?

• 50:00Speaker 05

  Never heard of it.

• 50:01Josh Clark?

  Well, it's apparently this legend or lore that there was a, anything from a Spanish galleon to a Viking ship that sailed up the Gulf of California and eventually got stuck and that turned into desert and the ship was swallowed up. And some people are saying it was actually in the Salton Basin, which is now underneath the Salton Sea. So there's this whole idea that there's a Viking ship potentially under there, too.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 50:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 50:31Speaker 05

  There's a great dive bar.

• 50:33Josh Clark?

  The Ski Inn, right?

• 50:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's in that video. They go to Ski Inn and play creepy old piano and have some beer.

• 50:40Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they call it the lowest dive bar in the Western Hemisphere.

• 50:44Speaker 05

  It is.

• 50:45Josh Clark?

  237 feet below sea level, I think.

• 50:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, right there at, I don't know if they still call it Bombay Beach or if they took that name away, but Bombay Nonbeach, because a beach without water is not a beach.

• 50:57Josh Clark?

  Right. There's also, it's attracted a lot of artists, too. Like Slab City is essentially a taken over military installation. There's a folk art installation called Salvation Mountain. There's another whole like outdoor gallery called East Jesus, I believe is what it's called. So there's a lot of art that's being made there. It's kind of turning it into a really neat, weird, decrepit art place.

• 51:27Speaker 05

  Cool.

• 51:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Josh Clark?

  You got anything else?

• 51:30Speaker 05

  I got nothing else.

• 51:32Josh Clark?

  Okay, well, that's it for the Salton Sea, everybody. We'll have to keep an eye on it and see what happens. And in the meantime, I think it's time for Listener Mail.

• 51:41Speaker 05

  Well, speaking of art, before I read Listener Mail, I want to give a plug to dear old Ben, our comrade here at Stuff You Should Know, our colleague. He is a producer, along with Jerry. And Ben is a musician, Ben Hackett, and he put out a great piece of art. He put out a record called Songs For Sleeping Dogs not too long ago. And Ben's awesome. Songs For Sleeping Dogs is great. It's very vibey, instrumental. I think you'd dig it, actually. And so, yeah, go check it out.

• 52:16Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 52:16Speaker 05

  Wherever you get music, basically.

• 52:18Josh Clark?

  Yes, Ben is our, probably our most beloved Stuff You Should Know member because he's just so cool and chill and nice.

• 52:25Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 52:26Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 05

  You say that in front of Jerry?

• 52:28Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 52:29Speaker 05

  Okay. All right, listener mail time. We've got a couple of, in the next couple of episodes on MTV and VH1 because we got great response. And it was also another one of those weird things where we did an episode and then something in real life happened and we had no idea that when we did our MTV episode, that like the next week MTV would fold, basically.

• 52:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Speaker 05

  It's music channels. It was just one of those strange Stuff You Should Know things that happen sometimes.

• 52:55Josh Clark?

  I didn't quite understand. So like it was just its music channels. I didn't know that it had any music channels left.

• 53:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think we talked about that, that there was still some, some music happening. Well, Jerry just buzzed in and said it's just in Europe, so I don't know what to believe now.

• 53:11Josh Clark?

  Well, they definitely did something and it was right after our episode, for sure.

• 53:16Speaker 05

  Yeah. All right, so this is about MTV. Hey, guys, hoping that you would touch on this, especially toward the end, when Josh is talking about the social impacts of MTV. But I'm talking about the MTV Cut. Before MTV, the average shot in a film or television show lasted an average of eight seconds. And the MTV Cut whittled that down to two seconds.

• 53:36Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  In college circa 2000, it was called the MTV Cut. Now, the MTV Cut is the norm. You'd be hard pressed to find a show that stays on one shot for eight seconds consistently anymore. I wonder if people changed or if the MTV Cut changed people

• 53:53Speaker 05

  and the way we watch.

• 53:54Josh Clark?

  I believe, I'll bet that's one of those things where if you saw it now, you'd be like, wow, this is really weird. And not quite put your finger on why, but it'd just be almost unsettling to see an eight-second cut.

• 54:06Speaker 05

  Maybe. I mean, I remember people talking about like quick cut because of music videos. Like, it was a thing. That is from Chris Singleton, who is an ops manager for Independence Rock Media.

• 54:18Josh Clark?

  Very nice, so Chris knows what they're talking about.

• 54:21Speaker 05

  I think so.

• 54:21Josh Clark?

  Well, thanks a lot, Chris. That was very interesting and we want to hear from you too. If you've got anything interesting to say, you can email.

• 54:28Speaker 05

  From you too?

• 54:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah. You can, yes, we want to hear from Bono and The Edge and the other guys.

• 54:34Speaker 05

  Oh, boy.

• 54:35Josh Clark?

  Um, what?

• 54:37Speaker 05

  Adam and Larry, come on.

• 54:38Josh Clark?

  There you go. Thank you. I could have come up with those, given a couple of months, for sure.

• 54:43Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 54:44Josh Clark?

  So, yeah, if you want to be like the band U2, you can email us at [email protected].

• 54:54Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 55:10Josh Clark?

  Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. And it starts with a great deal on an off-road-ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest-lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures, and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places.

• 55:45Speaker 11

  Welcome to the Haunted Library. Have you come in search of a tale? This podcast invites you to browse the shelves and find stories that will linger long after you've left this place. From Gothic masterpieces to poppy penny dreadfuls, join me, Colin Morgan, with new episodes twice a week. Find the Haunted Library wherever you get your podcasts.

• 56:11Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.