Salton sea features heavily, and you’ll learn the whole American West is on as fragile a water setup with similar health, civil and economic problems to follow as what this Salton sea example, but imagine it applying LA-wide, central Oregon-wide, Salt Lake valley-wide.
Water issues out west will be a major issue of USA’s next 70 years. Very scary stuff.
I watched a documentary a while back on the Salton Sea. It touched on the local residents that live in the area and how the dust affected the children. There were even plans of tapping into Mexico’s Laguna Salada to help keep the Salton Sea from drying up.
Although it’s not a natural sea and its full of chemicals from agricultural run off the residents that live in the area are suffering from the dust and fears of great dust clouds plumbing and going west to San Diego were also insensitives from keeping the hazardous Salton Sea from drying up.
Beautiful place to visit…just not during summer when it smells from all the Dead Sea life.
burning man dust is definitely an irritant (alkaline), but salton sea dust seems to contain many additional contaminants (pesticides, metals, biologicals)
I spent a few days in Bombay Beach, a small town right on the Salton Sea. There's a community of people that call this place home, most seem to be artists, outcasts or just people drawn to the ability to purchase an entire house for $20,000.
The air is clearly toxic, you smell it the second you get there. To live there means living in olfactory mental ignorance in exchange for affordable housing and community.
Are there any maps that show this? I was trying to figure out the range affected via common pollution visualizations but most showed the air quality around the area as good. All the articles just say "close" or "nearby".
Travelling to Joshua Tree later, which isn't right next door, but I'm not sure about wind patterns and stuff.
It seems it's presently only still here because of previous inefficient irrigation (from the Colorado River) and that farmers restricting their water usage is actually leading to the Salton's decline.
Not just inefficient, it was a large scale industrial accident. A canal wall was breached and not repaired for two years and the runoff all collected in this low lying area. It’s a very odd place to visit now though for marketing reasons they tried to make it into a resort destination before it became a place you can only tolerate for a very short time.
I was visiting Palm Springs one year, late summer. I had assumed that since it was in the middle of the desert, that water use would be regulated.
But as I drove around over there, I was shocked to see massive lawns being watered in the middle of the day, and large amounts of water just flowing out from these lawns into the drains. Sometimes the giant sprinklers were watering the sidewalks and roads too.
What a waste of water! Speaking to a local, they claimed that due to some old water rights agreement, Palm Springs gets its water for really cheap and there is no incentive to conserve it. Sad state of affairs.
The whole system is a mess. As wasteful as it can be, all residential use is only a small fraction of water consumption in this region. An order of magnitude more is used to grow water intensive crops in the SW deserts, and those farmers are only paying on average 1/10th the price per gallon for that same water as people pay for their home use. In many cases the farmers are incentivized to not be more water efficient, because the old water rights can be use it or lose it. They are essentially being paid to waste obscene amounts of water.
Municipal use and waste get the most attention because they are by far the most visible use, but most policies there are just tinkering around the edges and hardly move the overall numbers.
Not Palm Springs but close enough, reporting in for the curious. I've been wastelanding for a few years now in an unincorporated rural township, lucky to be close to allegedly sweet aquifers, but the utility is definitely mismanaged to the extent that it's pretty doubtful if anyone really knows how much water there is. Gold-mining interests are not far away (hello arsenic?), lithium interests are probably looking for an angle. I'm no geologist but maybe an endorheic basin that collects the sweet stuff is good for that too. Anyone think any of this water is being tested with a dismantled EPA?
Anyway a water bill is about $40/month up to 8000 gallons, $3 extra per 1000g overage. About half of the base rate is claimed as "upgrade surcharge". Since it's practically unlimited for free, does that sound right to anyone? The neighbors seem to be feral ghouls about 200 years old, they definitely don't care much about any poisons or the town drying up and blowing away, so they are always YOLOing a honking great deluge of whatever juice is still left into all different kinds of stupid inappropriate leafy greens but fuck it, you know? The pentagon is looking to restart nuclear testing in the backyard anyway so those of who still aren't irradiated yet can look forward to that!
The Salton Sea is drying up due to _decreased_ agricultural water consumption in the area; it was formed by agricultural run-off, which is why it's so toxic, and now there's less runoff to fill it up.
No, its lifespan was extended by agricultural runoff offsetting the natural drying out which would have otherwise occurred after the event which formed it was corrected, but it was formed by a breach in an irrigation canal that occurred in 1905 and wasn't repaired until 1907.
Regardless, it's sort of a bad example of "humans are the virus" type thinking, since it both lived and died by agriculture.
If you really dig into the story there is an interesting commentary about the horrible Western US water rights compacts system and the continuing inability for US states, especially in the West, to accurately price water consumption in a way that makes consumers sensitive to inefficient water use. But even then, in the case of the Salton Sea, the system actually did work: inefficient agricultural use was "improved" when San Diego called for more water and farmers were forced to be more efficient. Perhaps in an ideal world those farms would never have existed at all.
> it's sort of a bad example of "humans are the virus" type thinking, since it both lived and died by agriculture.
from "Islands of Abandonment":
> As I get further out, my feet sink deeper into the thin, grey sand. When I look closer, I see it is not sand at all, but the dry bones of fish, pounded into shards, and the tiny, skull-like husks of barnacles. This is a foul place. The air is thick with brine and guano and decomposition. Even now, in the violet dusk, the heat is oppressive. But as I cross the crystallised flats, the water gleams into view, an impossible sea in the middle of the desert.
> It is a poison lake whispering sweet nothings. It promises cool succour, quenched thirst. Despite what I know of this shimmering mirage - despite the stink and the rot and the waste that surrounds it, despite the staring eyes of the dead and desiccating fish that litter its shrinking shores, despite the absence of vegetation - I can’t help but quicken my pace. I stumble through sucking mud towards this false vision, on and on until the muck is over my feet, and up to my ankles, and I am shin-deep in a warm broth that, when stirred, releases a draught so stagnant I can taste it.
Seems like an excellent example of "humans are the virus" to me. Human error created an entire lake and then human inefficiency sustained it (for a while). Now the end product of all of that human activity is poisoning the air around it.
So two natural questions is it possible to deal with the dust either at the source, by collecting the dust somehow and treating it? Or perhaps it would be possible for people to to not get it inside homes and workplaces with appropriate hvac systems?
I wonder if there’s some way of terraforming the area so trees can grow? There has to be some combination of soil amendments and plant species that can thrive in that environment?
Geoff Lawton, the heir to the "permaculture" legacy, has a project in Jordan called "Greening the Desert" in one of the most arid regions of the country.
How scalable the techniques are is one matter but I think the results speak for themselves in proving what's possible with careful (read: high labor input) management.
Doesn't desert greening assume that desertification is something that can be reversed in the first place? I'm pretty sure it doesn't work on rain shadow deserts like this one, because there's no water or soil in the first place. Case in point: the greening of the surrounding area (Coachella Valley) is only made possible by unsustainable water use, and properties quickly revert to desert scrub flora when not constantly attended to.
This part of Jordan gets less rain per year than the Salton Sea.
The way that desertification spreads is primarily because the soil has no capacity for holding water. The most common cause of death in deserts is not actually thirst but drowning. The inability to hold moisture means thatwhen there is rain it can turn into flash floods which will then wash away any top soil there already is.
There are countless techniques used by this group to target that specific problem and build soil safely that won't get washed away. As well as storing water in ways that won't lead to evaporation. They build swales and shape the landscape in order to manage how and where the water flows through the land and use windbreaks to resist the harsh winds that may also lead to topsoil loss.
> This part of Jordan gets less rain per year than the Salton Sea.
According to the project, that area of Jordan gets 100mm per year of rain. The Salton sea gets under 75mm per year, so less than 3/4 of that. It appears that this part of Jordan is also significantly cooler and more humid, and has bodies of water within 100km. It also doesn't have a 3.5km high mountain range blocking clouds from passing over.
Unfortunately, the Salton sea has no water sources around it. There's no rivers, there's no Dead Sea. It seems like greening works best is places where there's enough water that tree roots can reach water. In Coachella Valley, the water is 300m deep, so no roots can reach it.
And, according to the desert greening project, greening increases rainfall by creating conditions more favorable for precipitation. The natural summertime relative humidity in the desert surrounding the Salton sea is as low as 4%, with 42C average temperatures. What are the practical limits when the water table is 300m below?
The valley only maintains current greenery by pumping huge amounts of water and constant watering, to the point where there's fogs in the morning caused by the pre-dawn watering. If greening could work in such extreme circumstances, wouldn't it be getting reversed already by this watering regime? Instead any small plot of land that isn't maintained is full of dead plants, even if they're drought tolerant species. Only a few kinds of desert plant native to the area seem to thrive.
Saw a joke theory saying that why Real Housewives of SLC has gotten so crazy recently is that the salt lake drying up has increased heavy metal content in the air and lowering IQ in the region.
>Saw a joke theory saying that why Real Housewives of SLC has gotten so crazy recently is that the salt lake drying up has increased heavy metal content in the air and lowering IQ in the region.
Which itself is a joke about accountability if you think about it.
The dead sea is even more concerning imo. Such an incredible history and unique ecology being lost so rapidly. It's the deepest hypersaline lake in the world but it's being drained at an appalling rate
Cadillac Desert, Marc Reisner, worth a read!
Salton sea features heavily, and you’ll learn the whole American West is on as fragile a water setup with similar health, civil and economic problems to follow as what this Salton sea example, but imagine it applying LA-wide, central Oregon-wide, Salt Lake valley-wide.
Water issues out west will be a major issue of USA’s next 70 years. Very scary stuff.
Not surprising. I have a friend who grew up in El Centro and had asthma his whole childhood. Shortly after moving, he never had respiratory issues.
I watched a documentary a while back on the Salton Sea. It touched on the local residents that live in the area and how the dust affected the children. There were even plans of tapping into Mexico’s Laguna Salada to help keep the Salton Sea from drying up.
Although it’s not a natural sea and its full of chemicals from agricultural run off the residents that live in the area are suffering from the dust and fears of great dust clouds plumbing and going west to San Diego were also insensitives from keeping the hazardous Salton Sea from drying up.
Beautiful place to visit…just not during summer when it smells from all the Dead Sea life.
Sea-Monk… I mean brine shrimp! Nice smell.
Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea narrated by John Waters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TjGAWxL23c
I watched this 20 years ago. It's a really interesting and funny documentary about the Salton Sea and the area around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_%26_Pleasures_on_the_S...
Wild. It's that John Waters. Surprised he's narrating something Californian.
researchers note: burning man provides an annual cohort of ethically sourced samples
burning man dust is definitely an irritant (alkaline), but salton sea dust seems to contain many additional contaminants (pesticides, metals, biologicals)
I spent a few days in Bombay Beach, a small town right on the Salton Sea. There's a community of people that call this place home, most seem to be artists, outcasts or just people drawn to the ability to purchase an entire house for $20,000.
The air is clearly toxic, you smell it the second you get there. To live there means living in olfactory mental ignorance in exchange for affordable housing and community.
Salt Lake City is also at risk of this happening with the Great Salt Lake if it continues to shrink and dry up.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/us/utah-great-salt-lake-dust-...
Already happening depending on if you live downwind of the dried up parts.
That’s incredibly depressing. That the damage is still being caused by water extraction is just so bad.
Palace of the Brine.
Are there any maps that show this? I was trying to figure out the range affected via common pollution visualizations but most showed the air quality around the area as good. All the articles just say "close" or "nearby".
Travelling to Joshua Tree later, which isn't right next door, but I'm not sure about wind patterns and stuff.
No wonder the lake is drying up with so much irrigation for agriculture, and an absurd number of golf courses in a very small area.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@33.6867973,-116.2608676,25994m
It's clear to me as an outsider that California has serious water sustainability problems. I mean, how long can this last?
I'm not sure the Salton is the best example of that. It's not a permanent fixture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea
It seems it's presently only still here because of previous inefficient irrigation (from the Colorado River) and that farmers restricting their water usage is actually leading to the Salton's decline.
Not just inefficient, it was a large scale industrial accident. A canal wall was breached and not repaired for two years and the runoff all collected in this low lying area. It’s a very odd place to visit now though for marketing reasons they tried to make it into a resort destination before it became a place you can only tolerate for a very short time.
Ah, interesting. Much more complicated than I'd think, especially as somebody not from those parts.
https://xkcd.com/1739/ - but with "terraforming"
I was visiting Palm Springs one year, late summer. I had assumed that since it was in the middle of the desert, that water use would be regulated.
But as I drove around over there, I was shocked to see massive lawns being watered in the middle of the day, and large amounts of water just flowing out from these lawns into the drains. Sometimes the giant sprinklers were watering the sidewalks and roads too.
What a waste of water! Speaking to a local, they claimed that due to some old water rights agreement, Palm Springs gets its water for really cheap and there is no incentive to conserve it. Sad state of affairs.
The whole system is a mess. As wasteful as it can be, all residential use is only a small fraction of water consumption in this region. An order of magnitude more is used to grow water intensive crops in the SW deserts, and those farmers are only paying on average 1/10th the price per gallon for that same water as people pay for their home use. In many cases the farmers are incentivized to not be more water efficient, because the old water rights can be use it or lose it. They are essentially being paid to waste obscene amounts of water.
Municipal use and waste get the most attention because they are by far the most visible use, but most policies there are just tinkering around the edges and hardly move the overall numbers.
Not Palm Springs but close enough, reporting in for the curious. I've been wastelanding for a few years now in an unincorporated rural township, lucky to be close to allegedly sweet aquifers, but the utility is definitely mismanaged to the extent that it's pretty doubtful if anyone really knows how much water there is. Gold-mining interests are not far away (hello arsenic?), lithium interests are probably looking for an angle. I'm no geologist but maybe an endorheic basin that collects the sweet stuff is good for that too. Anyone think any of this water is being tested with a dismantled EPA?
Anyway a water bill is about $40/month up to 8000 gallons, $3 extra per 1000g overage. About half of the base rate is claimed as "upgrade surcharge". Since it's practically unlimited for free, does that sound right to anyone? The neighbors seem to be feral ghouls about 200 years old, they definitely don't care much about any poisons or the town drying up and blowing away, so they are always YOLOing a honking great deluge of whatever juice is still left into all different kinds of stupid inappropriate leafy greens but fuck it, you know? The pentagon is looking to restart nuclear testing in the backyard anyway so those of who still aren't irradiated yet can look forward to that!
The Salton Sea is drying up due to _decreased_ agricultural water consumption in the area; it was formed by agricultural run-off, which is why it's so toxic, and now there's less runoff to fill it up.
> it was formed by agricultural run-off,
No, its lifespan was extended by agricultural runoff offsetting the natural drying out which would have otherwise occurred after the event which formed it was corrected, but it was formed by a breach in an irrigation canal that occurred in 1905 and wasn't repaired until 1907.
Whoops... it was formed by agricultural run-in!
Regardless, it's sort of a bad example of "humans are the virus" type thinking, since it both lived and died by agriculture.
If you really dig into the story there is an interesting commentary about the horrible Western US water rights compacts system and the continuing inability for US states, especially in the West, to accurately price water consumption in a way that makes consumers sensitive to inefficient water use. But even then, in the case of the Salton Sea, the system actually did work: inefficient agricultural use was "improved" when San Diego called for more water and farmers were forced to be more efficient. Perhaps in an ideal world those farms would never have existed at all.
> it's sort of a bad example of "humans are the virus" type thinking, since it both lived and died by agriculture.
from "Islands of Abandonment":
> As I get further out, my feet sink deeper into the thin, grey sand. When I look closer, I see it is not sand at all, but the dry bones of fish, pounded into shards, and the tiny, skull-like husks of barnacles. This is a foul place. The air is thick with brine and guano and decomposition. Even now, in the violet dusk, the heat is oppressive. But as I cross the crystallised flats, the water gleams into view, an impossible sea in the middle of the desert.
> It is a poison lake whispering sweet nothings. It promises cool succour, quenched thirst. Despite what I know of this shimmering mirage - despite the stink and the rot and the waste that surrounds it, despite the staring eyes of the dead and desiccating fish that litter its shrinking shores, despite the absence of vegetation - I can’t help but quicken my pace. I stumble through sucking mud towards this false vision, on and on until the muck is over my feet, and up to my ankles, and I am shin-deep in a warm broth that, when stirred, releases a draught so stagnant I can taste it.
surely not a place to be proud of.
Seems like an excellent example of "humans are the virus" to me. Human error created an entire lake and then human inefficiency sustained it (for a while). Now the end product of all of that human activity is poisoning the air around it.
The Salton Sea is artificial and not used for irrigation. It's actually a sink for a lot of agricultural runoff (which is part of the problem)
So two natural questions is it possible to deal with the dust either at the source, by collecting the dust somehow and treating it? Or perhaps it would be possible for people to to not get it inside homes and workplaces with appropriate hvac systems?
Keep it wet and it won't blow away.
I wonder if there’s some way of terraforming the area so trees can grow? There has to be some combination of soil amendments and plant species that can thrive in that environment?
Terraforming the area, so to speak, caused it to be how it is today.
With less than 3 inches of rainfall per year, I don't think plant-based terraforming is really a sustainable option.
Geoff Lawton, the heir to the "permaculture" legacy, has a project in Jordan called "Greening the Desert" in one of the most arid regions of the country.
How scalable the techniques are is one matter but I think the results speak for themselves in proving what's possible with careful (read: high labor input) management.
https://www.greeningthedesertproject.org/about-us/
Doesn't desert greening assume that desertification is something that can be reversed in the first place? I'm pretty sure it doesn't work on rain shadow deserts like this one, because there's no water or soil in the first place. Case in point: the greening of the surrounding area (Coachella Valley) is only made possible by unsustainable water use, and properties quickly revert to desert scrub flora when not constantly attended to.
This part of Jordan gets less rain per year than the Salton Sea.
The way that desertification spreads is primarily because the soil has no capacity for holding water. The most common cause of death in deserts is not actually thirst but drowning. The inability to hold moisture means thatwhen there is rain it can turn into flash floods which will then wash away any top soil there already is.
There are countless techniques used by this group to target that specific problem and build soil safely that won't get washed away. As well as storing water in ways that won't lead to evaporation. They build swales and shape the landscape in order to manage how and where the water flows through the land and use windbreaks to resist the harsh winds that may also lead to topsoil loss.
> This part of Jordan gets less rain per year than the Salton Sea.
According to the project, that area of Jordan gets 100mm per year of rain. The Salton sea gets under 75mm per year, so less than 3/4 of that. It appears that this part of Jordan is also significantly cooler and more humid, and has bodies of water within 100km. It also doesn't have a 3.5km high mountain range blocking clouds from passing over.
Unfortunately, the Salton sea has no water sources around it. There's no rivers, there's no Dead Sea. It seems like greening works best is places where there's enough water that tree roots can reach water. In Coachella Valley, the water is 300m deep, so no roots can reach it.
And, according to the desert greening project, greening increases rainfall by creating conditions more favorable for precipitation. The natural summertime relative humidity in the desert surrounding the Salton sea is as low as 4%, with 42C average temperatures. What are the practical limits when the water table is 300m below?
The valley only maintains current greenery by pumping huge amounts of water and constant watering, to the point where there's fogs in the morning caused by the pre-dawn watering. If greening could work in such extreme circumstances, wouldn't it be getting reversed already by this watering regime? Instead any small plot of land that isn't maintained is full of dead plants, even if they're drought tolerant species. Only a few kinds of desert plant native to the area seem to thrive.
This makes me incredibly concerned for the great salt lake
Saw a joke theory saying that why Real Housewives of SLC has gotten so crazy recently is that the salt lake drying up has increased heavy metal content in the air and lowering IQ in the region.
>Saw a joke theory saying that why Real Housewives of SLC has gotten so crazy recently is that the salt lake drying up has increased heavy metal content in the air and lowering IQ in the region.
Which itself is a joke about accountability if you think about it.
Arsenic is a joke?
The dead sea is even more concerning imo. Such an incredible history and unique ecology being lost so rapidly. It's the deepest hypersaline lake in the world but it's being drained at an appalling rate
https://www.haaretz.com/0000017f-ea1a-dea7-adff-fbfb7cbf0000
Real life lore did a great video about it recently. It’s inevitable at current water usage.
Toxic Salton Sea dust triggers changes in MICE lung microbiome after just one week.
I really wish this would be included in the headline in such stories.
Is there a repository somewhere that measures the number of studies on mice that go on to successful human trials or verification.
With the prominence of studies on mice, I think most humans trials Started on mice.
> With the prominence of studies on mice, I think most humans trials started on mice
they did
I’m more interested if normal dust doesn’t