Somebody carved a shortcut into a riverbank, and the river accepted it.<\/p>\n
By 1904, silt had obstructed the canal transporting Colorado River water to the farms of California\u2019s Imperial Valley, and the agricultural miracle that had been promised to settlers was struggling to survive in the fields. Engineers opened a temporary intake downstream to maintain water flow. This solution worked until winter. A series of floods in 1905 widened the makeshift opening, and the river, faced with the choice between its former path and a direct plunge into a below-sea-level basin, opted for the plunge.<\/p>\n
It continued on this course for about two years.<\/p>\n
An unrequested lake<\/p>\n
The figures are difficult to grasp. During the peak of the break, water surged into the Salton Sink at tens of thousands of cubic feet per second, carving new gorges into the desert floor. Southern Pacific Railroad observed its tracks vanish beneath the rising waters, prompting E. H. Harriman, the company\u2019s president, to seek assistance from President Theodore Roosevelt, as documented by EARTH magazine. Ultimately, thousands of men and trainloads of rock managed to redirect the Colorado back into its channel in February 1907, according to the timeline kept by the Salton Sea Authority.<\/p>\n
What remained was approximately 58 kilometers long and 42 wide. California had its largest lake, yet no one had requested it.<\/p>\n
Everyone presumed the desert would reclaim it. Federal authorities were so confident that in 1909 they set aside an additional 10,000 acres of submerged land in trust for the Torres Martinez Band of Desert Cahuilla Indians, anticipating it would revert to dry land by the 1920s.<\/p>\n
Farm runoff sustained it, then ceased<\/p>\n
Instead, the lake received a constant trickle. Water used for irrigating Imperial Valley fields needed to drain somewhere, and the only area lower than the fields was the lake. Agricultural runoff maintained the water level for nearly a century, sufficient time for the shoreline to develop marinas, yacht clubs, and a fleeting association with Frank Sinatra.<\/p>\n
Then the calculations altered. Farms improved their water usage efficiency, Colorado River allocations became stricter, and a hotter climate evaporated more from the surface each year. With reduced inflow and increased outflow, the shoreline began retreating. Around 16,000 acres of lakebed have been revealed in the last two decades, according to reports from the University of Southern California. That\u2019s a significant amount of newly exposed ground without anything keeping it down.<\/p>\n
Efficiency is the correct policy. It is also the reason the lake is dwindling, which is the type of dilemma water management continues to create for itself.<\/p>\n
What the wind extracts from the lakebed<\/p>\n
Exposed lakebed is referred to as playa, and this playa has been accumulating whatever the valley drained into it for a century. Fine sediments infused with selenium and arsenic, deposited from farm runoff and local geology, rest on the surface, ready for a windy afternoon, as summarized in a Congressional Research Service report. Imperial Valley experiences many windy afternoons.<\/p>\n
Determining the specific harmful components of that dust has proven to be more complicated than expected. A team at UC Riverside, led by David Lo, attempted to identify it by channeling aerosols from the lake into exposure chambers housing mice. Their findings, published in Science of The Total Environment and reported by the university, indicated that Salton Sea aerosol triggered a distinctly non-allergic type of lung inflammation, unlike the reaction to common household mold. Mice exposed to Pacific Ocean aerosol showed negligible effects. Lo suspects that the culprit is microbial material dissolved in the water rather than the heavy metals usually anticipated.<\/p>\n
That represents one laboratory study conducted on mice, and Lo has been cautious to clarify that this does not determine what occurs in human airways. Consider it a lead worth pursuing.<\/p>\n
What it has already inflicted on a generation’s lungs<\/p>\n
Human evidence is distinct, and it is dire. Researchers at the Keck School of Medicine of USC monitored 369 children in the valley for about two years, measuring how much air they could expel from their lungs and the speed of exhalation. Children residing within 11 kilometers of the shoreline showed slower lung capacity growth compared to those further away, a rate the school likens to living within 500 meters of a freeway. That study was published in JAMA Network Open. Prior research from the same group found that over one in five local children suffer from asthma, nearly three times the national rate.<\/p>\n
Lungs experience most of their growth during adolescence and then reach their peak. Miss the growth period, and there is no opportunity for a second chance.<\/p>\n
Hay bales, ponds, and a lithium surge<\/p>\n
California\u2019s response has been to focus on controlling the dust rather than replenishing the lake, as there is no excess river. Hay bales are staked across open playa to disrupt the wind. Shallow ponds are flooded during the worst conditions. State agencies managing the Salton Sea Management Program have been constructing engineered wetlands along the southern shore, both to capture sediment and to<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Somebody carved a shortcut into a riverbank, and the river accepted it. By 1904, silt had obstructed the canal transporting Colorado River water to the farms of California\u2019s Imperial Valley, and the agricultural miracle that had been promised to settlers was struggling to survive in the fields. Engineers opened a temporary intake downstream to maintain […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":376400,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"Default","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[179],"class_list":["post-376399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-source-scienceblog-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=376399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/376400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=376399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=376399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wolfscientific.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=376399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}