November 11, 2025 • 48 mins
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.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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 Orth
Science edition.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
I think, yeah, And I mean, we might as well
get into it because I just told Jerry the name
of this was Sultan Lake. And even though it's called
the Salton Sea, right, which is a it's an inland
lake in Imperial and Coachella Valleys and Riverside and Imperial
County in California, southern California. But and I said, it's
(00:44):
not really a sea, and you said it's an endless sea.
Then he said save it.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
And said this is gold. I didn't say save it
like that.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Well, no, I mean, I'm not gonna do my Josh impression.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
You just did a really mean Josh impression.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Save it? No, no, no, I guess we need to
determine this. Why do they call it a sea?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
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 lake.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I mean, I don't think it has any outlet to
the ocean anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Right, No, not anymore. We're going to talk about that.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, that makes it a lake, save it. 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 ocean and a sea does. Oh,
if I'm not mistaken, I might be wrong about that.
I didn't look it up.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
But I think California has a lot of work to do.
They need to go rewrite all their pamphlets and update
their websites and all that stuff. It's now the Saltan Lake.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Well, now all their pamphlets just say don't even bother
coming here, right to the Sultan Sea. That is not
a California.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I love California exactly. And the reason that they would
have pamphlets that say don't come here is because the
Salt and Sea is a genuine an ecological disaster. Yeah,
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
(02:12):
a Soso movie starring Val Kilmer back in the you know,
late nineties or early two thousands.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I think it was early two thousands. It was okay,
I saw it.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
The extra supporting character was meth.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah, it was very messy. Yeah, I've been here, by
the way, I was wondering that. 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 Salt and Sea and it wasn't
great back then. Imagine it's well, it sounds like it's
(02:47):
even worse now. But when did we talk about this before?
Was it desertification?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Oh? Maybe, because I know we've talked about that doesn't
ring a bell, but I mean so much.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
So that I was convinced we did a whole upisode.
But it could have been one of our ill can
see videos that we used to do.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
That's possible too, because I think I could see us
taking the angle that there were ghost towns there.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Oh, okay, you know ghost towns there are.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
There's a lot of ghost towns there is. 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
talk about how the Salt and Sea even came to be,
because that is an interesting story in and of itself.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, it totally is. It's in the Salton Basin and
that's Sa L t O N by the way, right,
and that is a very large trough, just sort of
a natural geological trough that led into at one point
the Gulf of California. But it was there were other
seas before this sea or lakes, if you want to
(03:51):
go that route.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah. From the oldest I saw is that we have
geological evidence of inland seas or lakes depending on your definition,
going back at least forty thousand years, and that it
was almost cyclical. There'd be 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
(04:12):
it would happen again a couple 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 I guess the Gulf
of California, right.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Are you asking me?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
So.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
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 bank so much
that a bunch of it gets diverted into the Saltan basin,
forming one of the salt and seas.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Over time, Yeah, for a while, Like you said, you know,
it could be there for a while, and eventually it's
on the middle of the desert, so eventually it's going
to evaporate, right. But as the river flowed in there,
it carried a lot of silts with it, and eventually
that silt gummed up the outlet so it couldn't get anywhere,
So there was a natural dam that was formed. And
(05:08):
you know, it was, like you said, 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 was just kind of weird geological cyclelog I mean,
I'm sure this has happened elsewhere, but it seems particularly
(05:30):
noteworthy for this area.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
It does. It seems kind of unique, you know, yeah,
I think so. There's also one of these lakes or seas.
You'll like this one because they call it a lake
Lake Kahuila, which formed about thirteen hundred years ago as
well as geologists can tell, and it stuck around for
hundreds of years, possibly up into the fifteen hundreds, and
(05:53):
at one point in the fifteen hundreds it flooded, so
it was already there, and it grew to about twenty
six times the size of the Sultan Sea. Oh wow,
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 sure, for
our Northern listeners, that is larger than the size of
(06:14):
Lake Erie.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
For our Canadian listeners, it's four times larger than the
capital city of Ottawa. For European listeners, that's larger than Belgium.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
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 twenty six times the size of
the Sultan Sea.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Wow, you did your homework, I did. Is there a
program to use, like just like Josh converts dot com?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
There there are?
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I make like twelve dollars a month on webed that's great. 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
it's been what's the size of ten thousand square miles?
Which is what that would be?
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Is a landing page? Just a banana? Yeah, it starts
from there.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah, Well where did that come from? Using a banana
for scale?
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Do you know?
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I don't know. I never I mean, who starts any
of these things?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Okay, I didn't know if it was something that you
had kind of brought up or something. Because I know
this stuff. You should know. Army is crazy for that.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
No, it's just an internet thing, you know. Okay, So
Ron's doing all of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Get all Ron. He comes up with the best memes.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
All right. So that was the cycle for thousands of years.
Depositing that silt. One of the byproducts of that is
it made that soil very rich and stuff could really
grow on it if it rained ever, which it doesn't.
So that was a problem, and irrigation's going to solve
that problem. So in the early nineteen hundreds, the Imperial
(07:55):
Canal was built to say, hey, let's divert some of
that Colorado River to so we can have drinking water,
and so we can irrigate this rich, rich soil that
lies beneath our feet. And they completed it, and you know,
it was pretty good, but that same silt is going
to keep clogging up even you know, kind of any
(08:15):
moving body of water, and that eventually happened to the canal,
like in a bad way, not too long after they opened.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
It, 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, yeah, 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.
(08:41):
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, as the water was flowing normally, But the
(09:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah, it rained a lot, a big rainy season and
then you know, snow melt and the rockies can always
be a problem if it was extra, and that year
it was extra. Coinciding with those rains, the Colorado River
swoll up again and it, you know, did what water does.
It goes down river in a pretty impactful way and
(09:37):
really overwhelmed that temporary channel that they were using to
divert around the cloud Canal. 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.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yeah, So essentially Colorado River decided I'll go this way instead,
So it actually changed its course from the 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 ninety thousand cubic feet of water per
second was flowing into the salt and sea. Right That
(10:14):
is the size of an Olympic sized pool. That much
water flowing in every second.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, and for our friends in the north, that's an
Olympic size pool, right, and I'm not going to keep.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Going, Well, what about our friends who like McDonald's.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Oh, I mean, if you did a big mac conversion,
that's really going the extra mile.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
It is exactly two million, two hundred and ninety five thousand,
nine hundred and eighteen big macs all flowing into the
salt and sea per second.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
So delicious.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
It does seem delicious, But imagine them all kind of
flowing at once and smacking into another probably get kind
of gross.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
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 nineteen oh seven.
But that's like what three years later, and you know,
(11:13):
by that point it's too late. They're like, all, right, now,
we got a four hundred square mile inland sea or lake,
depending on who's podcasting many years from now, right.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah. The way that they sealed it, the Union Pacific
Railroad because their lines were threatened. They're 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 twenty fifty seven car loads of rock, two hundred
and twenty one car loads of gravel, and two hundred
(11:43):
and three 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?
Speaker 1 (11:51):
How many big banks A lot?
Speaker 2 (11:54):
I didn't do that one. Sorry, it's okayoud we take
a break now?
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Or is that a should we? It seems like a
good time for a break.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah, the Sultan Sea is now there, the breach has
been sealed, and people are saying, what the heck are
we gonna do with this?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, we're gonna water ski eventually. So we'll come back
and talk about that right after.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
This learning stuff from Josh stuff you shoult No.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Lately I've been learning some stop about insomnia or aluminia.
How about the one on border like disorder?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
That are your order?
Speaker 1 (12:40):
That one before?
Speaker 2 (12:41):
But it was so nice, honest, Why except everybody listen.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Up shot, stop stop.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Stop.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
All right. So when we last left you, human experimentation
and sort of error and rain and snow melt caused
a four hundred square mile almost thirty five mile long
and fifteen mile wide, about thirty foot deep on average
lake to form in the middle of the California Desert
(13:22):
because it's where it was. Eventually, if humankind had not
intruded once again, it probably would have eventually just completely
evaporate like it had been doing for millennia. But like
we mentioned, that, soil is good stuff. So they started
to build, you know, farmland out there and irrigate that land.
And what do you do when you irrigate stuff, You
(13:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
No, Yeah, that's right. So it stabilized the lake in Deafen,
just the agricultural run off. One of the other things
that the other impacts that this had because they started
doing that in the twenties, is that agricultural runoff as
chalk full of salt, which I didn't realize, but this
irrigation produces a lot of salt, and that stuff was
flowing right into the Saltan and it turned it salty. Today,
(14:21):
I saw anywhere between one third or fifty percent more
salty than the Pacific Ocean. The salt and Sea has
become because of all that introduction. So it started freshwater,
and then because of agricultural runoff, it turned into a
salt water inland sea slash lake.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
That's right. And because it's located along the Pacific Flyway,
which is a great migratory bird route, the birds are 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 sportfish for
sport fishing, and of course that the birds love that
(14:59):
even more. So, all of a sudden, by the nineteen thirties,
you have a sort of a brand new wildlife refuge forming,
such that the US Fish and Wildlife Service even created
the Saltan Sea Wildlife Refuge to protect all the stuff
that was there. Now.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Yeah, so when the Sultan 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, that's right. So there are
some other weird things that didn't make it, but that
were introduced flamingos, which I guess aren't that weird. But
(15:36):
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 in 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
(15:57):
remember this for later. It's a dormant but not extinct volcano.
It's just kind of sitting there, chilling, waiting to go up.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
That's right. And you know, once you have flamingos, you're
going to have people because people want to go see
this flamingos. So by the nineteen fifties, developers had come
along and turned it into what they called the California
Riviera or the Saltan 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 springsy vibe, like you know,
(16:29):
Elvis performed there, Frank Sinatra performed there. They had you know,
I wasn't kidding about the water skiing. They people yachted,
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, right, and
Palm Springs gets a little crowded, So now we have
(16:49):
this beautiful Inland Sea Lake. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
People started building vacation homes there. There were very famous
speedboat races that were held there every year. At one
point point, some developers sunk two million dollars in nineteen
sixty 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.
(17:15):
There was a Bombay Beach resident, Who's.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Going to get postcards?
Speaker 2 (17:18):
They had postcards?
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Swear they did. They sell shotglasses.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
I yes, there was a Spencer's Gifts on the Sultan
Sea in the sixties. All right, you could also get
a Bitch and Grateful Dead poster and a LaToya Jackson
and Lingerie poster.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Right is Shenna Lambeau.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I know that's Garfield.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
So there was this Bombay Beach resident, which is one
of the little party towns on the Saltan Sea, and
it's still there. There's something like three hundred and fifty
people that lived 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
(18:02):
time bomb just growing underneath their water skis essentially day
by day. And so finally in around the seventies it
became clear that the salt and seas glitz was starting
to weih off and there was rotten big max underneath.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Do you know I thought you were going to lead
it in with when you said the problem is I
thought you were going to say, is it spring break
is not meant to last forever?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Oh, that's a great one. Let's go back and edit
that in just a note. Okay, there'll be no context,
You'll just add it in and then we'll leave the
part where you suggested into I agree.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Uh yeah, so yeah, things will go downhill pretty quickly.
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 going to rain, so that's not going to
fill that thing back up. They had that agricultural runoff
for many years, but as we'll see, that would end
(18:56):
up being a big part of the problem. Yeahments would flood,
you know, because they were building, you know, lakeside properties
and stuff like that. So 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.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah, it hubris. Yeah, 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
(19:37):
of this toxic water didn't have anywhere to go, right,
it just stayed in the lake. Yeah, And anytime you
have a lot of 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
(19:57):
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, some kinds
of it actually produce toxins that can do things like
damage humans livers or their DNA or cause respiratory failure.
(20:20):
So all this stuff is starting to like happen in
the Sultan Sea starting in the seventies and eighties, and
it's it's just becoming clear that there's problems that are
starting to brew, like literally brewing within the salt and sea.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, it's called utrification. And there are some pretty staggering
and very sad statistics that we're going to kind of
run through here as far as the die off, because
you know, the fish die off, and then eventually because
of the fish die off, the bird die off was
really massive. This one is fairly staggering. Just over a
five month period from December ninety one to April ninety two,
(20:57):
one hundred and fifty thousand little small waterbirds are called
what are those eared grebs?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Is that? What was that? How we're pronouncing that?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
I was gonna say grevi's, but I think you nailed it.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
I'm not really sure, but they're little small waterbirds. And
one hundred and fifty thousand them died over five months.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
On the Saltan Sea. Another twenty thousand and ninety four
ten thousand white and brown pelicans died out in nineteen
ninety six, about ten thousand 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
(21:37):
sort of single die off of an endangered species to
ever happen.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah. Yeah, and all this is going down on the
Saltan Sea.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Or the Telapia. Man, how about that stat?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
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 nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
How did they figure that, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
They must have counted one in like a square foot
and then multiplied it by a big mash or something.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, by this case fish tacos. Maybe that was probably insensitive.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
What fish tacos?
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Well, I mean this is good for I don't eat
telapia much, but it's pretty good for a fish taco.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Aren't they the rats of the sea?
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, I think so. I used to eat it more.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
I'll eat tilapia. I'm not that fancy. Oh oh yeah, yeah,
I'll eat tilapia right in front of you.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Well, I'll be dining on my Chilean sea bass or
what was that something toothfish? Right?
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Did I forgot Patagonia? That's the real name for sea bass,
that's right, suckers. So yes, again, I think it's worth
restating eight million tilapia died in a single day in
nineteen ninety nine. The previous record before that had been
set the summer prior, and that was five hundred thousand
that died on a single day. So clearly things are
(23:03):
getting worse by the year. At the Sultan's Sea by
the time the nineties roll around.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
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 and a really saline body of water
can kill fish on mass. And that's exactly what was
going on as the salt and sea warmed, as summer
(23:50):
started to kind of get going. And there's like one
hundred and five degree August temperatures hot water. Warm water
carry 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.
(24:11):
And so fish die offs are just an annual part
of life around the salt and sea.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Yeah, And I mean not only that, it's just losing
surface area. It's shrinking, so ten percent has been lost
in recent years. They're projecting forty percent by twenty thirty.
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,
(24:41):
you know, it's a bad scene. It's getting just salty
air over the years, it's getting more you know, chalk
full of more densely packed pesticides and things. And they're
saying that the salinity is probably going to increase another
maybe three times in the next ten years, basically kind
of taking care of anything else that might still be
living there.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
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
forty percent by twenty thirty. So things are getting dire here, right,
(25:21):
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 nineteen
eighty four because there was a flood from agricultural runoff.
And then I saw a really cool, eerie picture, Chuck.
(25:42):
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 like that, and
it looks like everybody kind of left the Saltan Sea
(26:04):
mid movie. It's really cool to see. I would strongly
suggest looking up that picture. I don't remember where I
saw it.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
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 roller coaster parks, amusement parks. We'll still go to
the Sultan Sea to kind of check things out. And
(26:34):
one of these videos it's from the Gnarly Speed Shop,
and I think if you just look up abandoned cars
that drive in on YouTube Gnarly speed Shop, they do
a cool video sort of walk through 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
(26:57):
frame because I guess it's kind of closest to the road,
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 what
was possible, which is very creepy. I don't know if
that was like a message to a long lost love
or if it was, you know, relating to the Saltan
(27:17):
Sea and what happened there. But it's 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 middle of a movie. I think people
just like went and like park their cars in this
abandoned lot, is what happened?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
You know, think you thought I didn't think you thought that.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
So I remembered where I saw it, Chuck. I saw
it on a slide show on all that's interesting. Great, 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?
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Okay, stuff you shout.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Lately, I've been learning some stop about in Saunia or Aluminia.
How about the one on border like sorder that or
yacht border? Heard that one before, but it was so nice, Arnes,
Why except nobody listen up? Stop stop stop?
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Okay, Chuck. So the Sultan 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
(28:58):
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 Saltan 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
(29:19):
this is the state of the Salton seasons. People are like,
we need to do something about this. And for years
and years, starting in the early late nineties early two thousands,
the idea was, let's just restore it to its former glory.
And that idea became a non starter essentially for the
(29:40):
next couple 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.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah there, we'll talk about a bunch of the stops
and starts over the years. In two thousand and three,
the water Districts of Southern California signed off That was
this deal that they had been negotiating for years called
the Quantification Settlement Agreement of QSA, And basically what they
were trying to get done was say, hey, let's once
(30:11):
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 the
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, and in exchange, those areas
would say, all right, now, what we're gonna do is
(30:33):
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 waste water, 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.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Right. So, the problem as far as the Salton Sea
is concerned that agricultural runoff, remember was keeping it going. Yeah,
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 salt and sea any longer.
(31:14):
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 salt
and sea for fifteen years.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
They even paid the farmers to leave some of their
land fallow so they could direct that water to the
Sultan Sea. In retrospect, that seems like total madness. They
were essentially wasting all of that water, but it actually
turned out to be pressy, and 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.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
It's sort of like leaving the water on in your
tub with the drain slightly open, yeah, and just being like,
we're just going to leave the tub water on for
fifteen years so we can keep this body of water.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yes, but your tub you got from an abandoned house, right,
and it had it has bath water that's one hundred
years old and full of pollutants and algae, and you're
just running your water into it.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, So it's a horror movie tub.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
It's a yes, exactly, that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
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. 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
(32:39):
eventually might happen, But it's still a habitat. It's still
a migratory stop for birds on that fly route, right,
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 Salt and Sea was
as sad as it was was like an oasis for
them on right.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, that is sad because if the salt and Sea
is the more attractive option, because that's all that's left,
those poor birds are in trouble. It's not just the
birds that are in trouble. There are people that still
live around there. In fact, I was really surprised to
find the Salt and City, which I believe is the
biggest town along the Salt and Sea. It's on the
(33:21):
northwest shore. Their population actually increased since the twenty twenty
census by almost one thousand people, which are like wow,
a thousand people who cares well, They were less than
six thousand in population at the time of the twenty
twenty census, So people are moving there because the housing
is so affordable it's insane. So there's people. There's in
(33:42):
the whole region, there's something like six hundred and fifty
thousand people, and all of those people are at tremendous
risk right now of a cornucopia of health hazards that
are starting to develop because of the salt and sea
evaporates more and more and more because off isn't sustaining
it anymore, and it's so hot that exposed sea bed
(34:05):
or lake bed that's so chock full of toxins that
you can barely look at it is turning to dust
that's getting blown off into the surrounding areas and causing
all sorts of problems.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Yeah, asthma. They've already found an uptick in asthma. There's
a doctor named Jill Johnson, a PhD who's an assistant
professor of preventative medicine at Southern cal and she's working
on a research project called the Saltan Sea in Children's
Health colon assessing Imperial Valley respiratory health and environment. In
(34:39):
the environment along with partner show Rey Farzan and other PhD.
And they're basically following elementary school children in that area
and are seeing how their health is advancing and right
now pretty bad asthma rates and haven't proved causation yet,
but it seems like it's probably.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
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. Yeah,
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
(35:20):
there's metals, pesticides, DDT has 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.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, And that's that's just like health issues. There's also
like a financial impact. There was a study about eleven
years ago or so from the Pacific Institute. They're a
think tank in Oakland that deals with water policy, and
and they said the financial toll could be as much
as seventy billion dollars over the next thirty years, right,
(36:04):
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, twenty five years, has had various stops
and starts with funding for different projects that will get
(36:26):
approved and then the money just gets diverted or never
shows up.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah, and especially before that twenty fourteen study from the
Pacific Institute, people are like this, eight billion dollars seems
like a little much to restore the salt and 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
(36:53):
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 Sultan Sea. Yeah,
the political will just hasn't been there. And one of
the things you could do if you were a senator,
a congress person, a governor, you could fully go after
a bunch of funds to save the Sultan Sea and
(37:15):
remediate the area and get it back to its former glory.
And then your legislature would say, no, we're not funding that.
You'd be like, oh, man, I tried. And that seems
like what the pattern was for the first like about
twenty ish years, maybe a little more than that that
people started coming up with ideas to do something about this.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, Gray Davis, when he was governor in two thousand
and three assigned the Saltan Sea Record I'm sorry, Restoration
Act and the Saltan Sea Restoration Fund, but that didn't
receive funding. So a fund without funding is not a fund. No,
just like a sea without an outlet as a lake. Right, yes, absolutely,
(37:56):
all right. In two thousand and seven, the Corp of Engineers,
the Army Corps Engineers, got authorization to spend up to
thirty million on projects. The money was finally appropriated in
twenty fifteen, and the Obama administration spent a couple of
hundred grand is all on a study, another study.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Even that was the thirty million, that's what it turned
out to be from what I can tell, it went
from thirty million dollars to two hundred thousand dollars and
it was for another study. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Yeah? I mean none of this, though, is going to
make any difference. I mean even a thirty million dollar thing,
or I think there was one plan. Yeah, a ten
year Saltan sea plan to cost three hundred and eighty
three million. But that's not even for restoration, because, like
you said, that ship is sailed. It is a multi
(38:44):
multi billion dollar thing if they want to get this
thing back to the California riviera. So right, it doesn't
seem like that's just ever going to happen. It's not empossible.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
No, So now they're looking at restoring parts of it
to turn it back into wetlands for birds. Right, And
that ten year plan is estimated to cost three hundred
and eighty three million dollars.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Just to do that.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, And it looked like it was just going to
be another pie in the sky, a proposal that would
never get funding. But California came up with something like
two hundred million dollars of that. They're under Devin Newsom.
In the last couple of years. It has been huge,
crazy movements compared to what had been done in the
last couple of decades, and California came up with two
(39:27):
hundred million dollars out of nowhere. Mind bogglingly, the federal
government chipped in another two hundred and forty million dollars
two hundred and forty five So now this project that
needed three hundred and eighty three million has almost half
a billion. So not only are they now on the
salt and sea saying like, you know, when are we
(39:47):
ever going to be able to do anything about this too,
we can actually do more than we wanted to do
in our ten year plan. The things are starting to
pick up, and they're starting to restore wetlands, and it
actually looks like it's going to not be quite the
ecological disaster that it would have been California just sat
on its hands.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Yeah. I think between twenty and three and twenty sixteen,
just a few dozen acres of the wetland were restored.
Since then about two thousand more, and the Species Conservation
Habitat Project has a plan over the next decade to
restore another nine thousand acres, so that'd be like roughly
(40:28):
twelve thousand 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
(40:49):
means there's some hotspots there, and so some people are saying, hey,
let's put a few billion dollars toward a geothermal electricity plant. Yeah,
mine some lithium.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
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 twenty first century gold because 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 it's a lithium mine there, And of course they're
(41:24):
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. 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
(41:46):
worse than it was. But my money is definitely on
them lithium mining.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
There's a couple other things that are noteworthy about the Sultancy.
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, Oh yeah, some
of them are actually true. The Navy used to use
(42:13):
the salt and sea to drop test bombs or dummy bombs,
to basically train their bomber pilots how to drop bombs,
and they actually supposedly practiced for the atomic bomb drops
and they are so there's dummy bombs under the salt
and sea still, and of course locals are like, that's
just a cover story. They actually lost an atomic bomb
(42:33):
and that's what's hiding there. There's an undetonated atomic bomb
under there. Now, there are a bunch of Navy planes
that dig crash. I think eighteen flyers died over the years,
but there's twenty four planes sunken in the Salt and
Sea right now. And then there's this one really weird
legend that predates the Salt and Sea. It's the Lost
(42:55):
Ship of the Desert. Have you ever heard of that?
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Never heard of it?
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Well, it's a apparently this legendary lower that there was
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
Salt and Basin, which is now underneath the Salt and Sea.
(43:23):
So there's this whole idea that there's a Viking ship
potentially under there too.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
Wow. Yeah, there's a great dive bar the ski In right, Yeah,
it's in that video they go to ski In and
play creepy old piano and have some beer. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
They call it the lowest dive bar in the Western
Hemisphere because it is two hundred and thirty seven feet
below sea level.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
I think, yeah, right there at the I don't know
if they still call it Bombay Beach or if they
took that name away. But Bombay non beach because of
beach without water is not a beach, right.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
There's also it's attracted a lot of artists too, like
a 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 that's kind of turning it into a
(44:20):
really neat, weird, decrepit art place.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Cool.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (44:29):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Okay, Well, let's it for the sull and see everybody
will have to keep an eye on it and see
what happens. And in the meantime, I think it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
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,
(45:02):
not too long ago. And Ben's awesome songs for Sleeping
Dogs is great. It's this very vibey instrumental. I think
you dig it actually, and so yeah, go check it out,
yeah wherever you get music.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
Basically, yes, Ben is probably our most beloved stuff you
should remember because he's just so cool and chill and nice.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Whoa yeah you say that in front of Jerry. Okay,
all right, listener to mail time. We got a couple
of in the next couple of episodes on MTV VH
one 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
(45:46):
that like the next week MTV would fold. Basically, yeah,
it's music channels. It was just one of those strange
stuff you should know, things that happened sometimes I.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Didn't quite understand, so like it was just its music channels.
I didn't know that it had any music channels left.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Yeah, I think we talked about that, that there was
still some music happening. Well, Jerry just buzzed in and said,
it's just in Europe, So I don't know what to believe.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Now, Well, they definitely did something and it was right
after our episode for sure.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
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 MTB.
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. In College Circle two thousand, it
(46:37):
was called the MTB 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 and the way we watch.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
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 a eight
second cut.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
Maybe. I mean, I remember people talking about like quickcut
because of music videos, like it was a thing. That
is from Chris Singleton, who is an ops manager for
Independence Rock Media.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Very nice, So Chris knows what they're talking about.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
I think so well.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
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 eat you toob Yeah you can. Yes,
we want to hear from Bono and the Edge and
the other guys.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
No, boy, what Madam and Larry come on, there you go.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Thank you. I could have come up with those given
a couple of months, for sure.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
So yeah, if you want to be like the band,
you two, you can email us at stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
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 Orth
Science edition.
Speaker 1 (00:20):
I think, yeah, And I mean, we might as well
get into it because I just told Jerry the name
of this was Sultan Lake. And even though it's called
the Salton Sea, right, which is a it's an inland
lake in Imperial and Coachella Valleys and Riverside and Imperial
County in California, southern California. But and I said, it's
(00:44):
not really a sea, and you said it's an endless sea.
Then he said save it.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
And said this is gold. I didn't say save it
like that.
Speaker 1 (00:53):
Well, no, I mean, I'm not gonna do my Josh impression.
Speaker 2 (00:57):
You just did a really mean Josh impression.
Speaker 1 (00:59):
Save it? No, no, no, I guess we need to
determine this. Why do they call it a sea?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
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 lake.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
I mean, I don't think it has any outlet to
the ocean anymore.
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Right, No, not anymore. We're going to talk about that.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, that makes it a lake, save it. 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 ocean and a sea does. Oh,
if I'm not mistaken, I might be wrong about that.
I didn't look it up.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
But I think California has a lot of work to do.
They need to go rewrite all their pamphlets and update
their websites and all that stuff. It's now the Saltan Lake.
Speaker 1 (01:45):
Well, now all their pamphlets just say don't even bother
coming here, right to the Sultan Sea. That is not
a California.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I love California exactly. And the reason that they would
have pamphlets that say don't come here is because the
Salt and Sea is a genuine an ecological disaster. Yeah,
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
(02:12):
a Soso movie starring Val Kilmer back in the you know,
late nineties or early two thousands.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
I think it was early two thousands. It was okay,
I saw it.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
The extra supporting character was meth.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
Yeah, it was very messy. Yeah, I've been here, by
the way, I was wondering that. 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 Salt and Sea and it wasn't
great back then. Imagine it's well, it sounds like it's
(02:47):
even worse now. But when did we talk about this before?
Was it desertification?
Speaker 2 (02:52):
Oh? Maybe, because I know we've talked about that doesn't
ring a bell, but I mean so much.
Speaker 1 (02:58):
So that I was convinced we did a whole upisode.
But it could have been one of our ill can
see videos that we used to do.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
That's possible too, because I think I could see us
taking the angle that there were ghost towns there.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Oh, okay, you know ghost towns there are.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
There's a lot of ghost towns there is. 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
talk about how the Salt and Sea even came to be,
because that is an interesting story in and of itself.
Speaker 1 (03:30):
Yeah, it totally is. It's in the Salton Basin and
that's Sa L t O N by the way, right,
and that is a very large trough, just sort of
a natural geological trough that led into at one point
the Gulf of California. But it was there were other
seas before this sea or lakes, if you want to
(03:51):
go that route.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
Yeah. From the oldest I saw is that we have
geological evidence of inland seas or lakes depending on your definition,
going back at least forty thousand years, and that it
was almost cyclical. There'd be 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
(04:12):
it would happen again a couple 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 I guess the Gulf
of California, right.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Are you asking me?
Speaker 2 (04:29):
I think so.
Speaker 1 (04:29):
So.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
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 bank so much
that a bunch of it gets diverted into the Saltan basin,
forming one of the salt and seas.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Over time, Yeah, for a while, Like you said, you know,
it could be there for a while, and eventually it's
on the middle of the desert, so eventually it's going
to evaporate, right. But as the river flowed in there,
it carried a lot of silts with it, and eventually
that silt gummed up the outlet so it couldn't get anywhere,
So there was a natural dam that was formed. And
(05:08):
you know, it was, like you said, 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 was just kind of weird geological cyclelog I mean,
I'm sure this has happened elsewhere, but it seems particularly
(05:30):
noteworthy for this area.
Speaker 2 (05:31):
It does. It seems kind of unique, you know, yeah,
I think so. There's also one of these lakes or seas.
You'll like this one because they call it a lake
Lake Kahuila, which formed about thirteen hundred years ago as
well as geologists can tell, and it stuck around for
hundreds of years, possibly up into the fifteen hundreds, and
(05:53):
at one point in the fifteen hundreds it flooded, so
it was already there, and it grew to about twenty
six times the size of the Sultan Sea. Oh wow,
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 sure, for
our Northern listeners, that is larger than the size of
(06:14):
Lake Erie.
Speaker 1 (06:15):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (06:16):
For our Canadian listeners, it's four times larger than the
capital city of Ottawa. For European listeners, that's larger than Belgium.
Speaker 1 (06:25):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
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 twenty six times the size of
the Sultan Sea.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
Wow, you did your homework, I did. Is there a
program to use, like just like Josh converts dot com?
Speaker 2 (06:47):
There there are?
Speaker 1 (06:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
I make like twelve dollars a month on webed that's great. 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
it's been what's the size of ten thousand square miles?
Which is what that would be?
Speaker 1 (07:04):
Is a landing page? Just a banana? Yeah, it starts
from there.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
Yeah, Well where did that come from? Using a banana
for scale?
Speaker 1 (07:13):
Do you know?
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Oh?
Speaker 1 (07:14):
I don't know. I never I mean, who starts any
of these things?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Okay, I didn't know if it was something that you
had kind of brought up or something. Because I know
this stuff. You should know. Army is crazy for that.
Speaker 1 (07:23):
No, it's just an internet thing, you know. Okay, So
Ron's doing all of that stuff.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Get all Ron. He comes up with the best memes.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
All right. So that was the cycle for thousands of years.
Depositing that silt. One of the byproducts of that is
it made that soil very rich and stuff could really
grow on it if it rained ever, which it doesn't.
So that was a problem, and irrigation's going to solve
that problem. So in the early nineteen hundreds, the Imperial
(07:55):
Canal was built to say, hey, let's divert some of
that Colorado River to so we can have drinking water,
and so we can irrigate this rich, rich soil that
lies beneath our feet. And they completed it, and you know,
it was pretty good, but that same silt is going
to keep clogging up even you know, kind of any
(08:15):
moving body of water, and that eventually happened to the canal,
like in a bad way, not too long after they opened.
Speaker 2 (08:21):
It, 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, yeah, 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.
(08:41):
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, as the water was flowing normally, But the
(09:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (09:15):
Yeah, it rained a lot, a big rainy season and
then you know, snow melt and the rockies can always
be a problem if it was extra, and that year
it was extra. Coinciding with those rains, the Colorado River
swoll up again and it, you know, did what water does.
It goes down river in a pretty impactful way and
(09:37):
really overwhelmed that temporary channel that they were using to
divert around the cloud Canal. 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.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
Yeah, So essentially Colorado River decided I'll go this way instead,
So it actually changed its course from the 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 ninety thousand cubic feet of water per
second was flowing into the salt and sea. Right That
(10:14):
is the size of an Olympic sized pool. That much
water flowing in every second.
Speaker 1 (10:21):
Yeah, and for our friends in the north, that's an
Olympic size pool, right, and I'm not going to keep.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
Going, Well, what about our friends who like McDonald's.
Speaker 1 (10:31):
Oh, I mean, if you did a big mac conversion,
that's really going the extra mile.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
It is exactly two million, two hundred and ninety five thousand,
nine hundred and eighteen big macs all flowing into the
salt and sea per second.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
So delicious.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
It does seem delicious, But imagine them all kind of
flowing at once and smacking into another probably get kind
of gross.
Speaker 1 (10:53):
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 nineteen oh seven.
But that's like what three years later, and you know,
(11:13):
by that point it's too late. They're like, all, right, now,
we got a four hundred square mile inland sea or lake,
depending on who's podcasting many years from now, right.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
Yeah. The way that they sealed it, the Union Pacific
Railroad because their lines were threatened. They're 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 twenty fifty seven car loads of rock, two hundred
and twenty one car loads of gravel, and two hundred
(11:43):
and three 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?
Speaker 1 (11:51):
How many big banks A lot?
Speaker 2 (11:54):
I didn't do that one. Sorry, it's okayoud we take
a break now?
Speaker 1 (12:00):
Or is that a should we? It seems like a
good time for a break.
Speaker 2 (12:04):
Yeah, the Sultan Sea is now there, the breach has
been sealed, and people are saying, what the heck are
we gonna do with this?
Speaker 1 (12:12):
Yeah, we're gonna water ski eventually. So we'll come back
and talk about that right after.
Speaker 2 (12:16):
This learning stuff from Josh stuff you shoult No.
Speaker 1 (12:26):
Lately I've been learning some stop about insomnia or aluminia.
How about the one on border like disorder?
Speaker 2 (12:37):
That are your order?
Speaker 1 (12:40):
That one before?
Speaker 2 (12:41):
But it was so nice, honest, Why except everybody listen.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
Up shot, stop stop.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Stop.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
All right. So when we last left you, human experimentation
and sort of error and rain and snow melt caused
a four hundred square mile almost thirty five mile long
and fifteen mile wide, about thirty foot deep on average
lake to form in the middle of the California Desert
(13:22):
because it's where it was. Eventually, if humankind had not
intruded once again, it probably would have eventually just completely
evaporate like it had been doing for millennia. But like
we mentioned, that, soil is good stuff. So they started
to build, you know, farmland out there and irrigate that land.
And what do you do when you irrigate stuff, You
(13:43):
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.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
No, Yeah, that's right. So it stabilized the lake in Deafen,
just the agricultural run off. One of the other things
that the other impacts that this had because they started
doing that in the twenties, is that agricultural runoff as
chalk full of salt, which I didn't realize, but this
irrigation produces a lot of salt, and that stuff was
flowing right into the Saltan and it turned it salty. Today,
(14:21):
I saw anywhere between one third or fifty percent more
salty than the Pacific Ocean. The salt and Sea has
become because of all that introduction. So it started freshwater,
and then because of agricultural runoff, it turned into a
salt water inland sea slash lake.
Speaker 1 (14:39):
That's right. And because it's located along the Pacific Flyway,
which is a great migratory bird route, the birds are 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 sportfish for
sport fishing, and of course that the birds love that
(14:59):
even more. So, all of a sudden, by the nineteen thirties,
you have a sort of a brand new wildlife refuge forming,
such that the US Fish and Wildlife Service even created
the Saltan Sea Wildlife Refuge to protect all the stuff
that was there. Now.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
Yeah, so when the Sultan 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, that's right. So there are
some other weird things that didn't make it, but that
were introduced flamingos, which I guess aren't that weird. But
(15:36):
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 in 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
(15:57):
remember this for later. It's a dormant but not extinct volcano.
It's just kind of sitting there, chilling, waiting to go up.
Speaker 1 (16:05):
That's right. And you know, once you have flamingos, you're
going to have people because people want to go see
this flamingos. So by the nineteen fifties, developers had come
along and turned it into what they called the California
Riviera or the Saltan 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 springsy vibe, like you know,
(16:29):
Elvis performed there, Frank Sinatra performed there. They had you know,
I wasn't kidding about the water skiing. They people yachted,
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, right, and
Palm Springs gets a little crowded, So now we have
(16:49):
this beautiful Inland Sea Lake. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
People started building vacation homes there. There were very famous
speedboat races that were held there every year. At one
point point, some developers sunk two million dollars in nineteen
sixty 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.
(17:15):
There was a Bombay Beach resident, Who's.
Speaker 1 (17:17):
Going to get postcards?
Speaker 2 (17:18):
They had postcards?
Speaker 1 (17:19):
Swear they did. They sell shotglasses.
Speaker 2 (17:22):
I yes, there was a Spencer's Gifts on the Sultan
Sea in the sixties. All right, you could also get
a Bitch and Grateful Dead poster and a LaToya Jackson
and Lingerie poster.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
Right is Shenna Lambeau.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
I know that's Garfield.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (17:42):
So there was this Bombay Beach resident, which is one
of the little party towns on the Saltan Sea, and
it's still there. There's something like three hundred and fifty
people that lived 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
(18:02):
time bomb just growing underneath their water skis essentially day
by day. And so finally in around the seventies it
became clear that the salt and seas glitz was starting
to weih off and there was rotten big max underneath.
Speaker 1 (18:18):
Do you know I thought you were going to lead
it in with when you said the problem is I
thought you were going to say, is it spring break
is not meant to last forever?
Speaker 2 (18:25):
Oh, that's a great one. Let's go back and edit
that in just a note. Okay, there'll be no context,
You'll just add it in and then we'll leave the
part where you suggested into I agree.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
Uh yeah, so yeah, things will go downhill pretty quickly.
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 going to rain, so that's not going to
fill that thing back up. They had that agricultural runoff
for many years, but as we'll see, that would end
(18:56):
up being a big part of the problem. Yeahments would flood,
you know, because they were building, you know, lakeside properties
and stuff like that. So 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.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Yeah, it hubris. Yeah, 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
(19:37):
of this toxic water didn't have anywhere to go, right,
it just stayed in the lake. Yeah, And anytime you
have a lot of 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
(19:57):
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, some kinds
of it actually produce toxins that can do things like
damage humans livers or their DNA or cause respiratory failure.
(20:20):
So all this stuff is starting to like happen in
the Sultan Sea starting in the seventies and eighties, and
it's it's just becoming clear that there's problems that are
starting to brew, like literally brewing within the salt and sea.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
Yeah, it's called utrification. And there are some pretty staggering
and very sad statistics that we're going to kind of
run through here as far as the die off, because
you know, the fish die off, and then eventually because
of the fish die off, the bird die off was
really massive. This one is fairly staggering. Just over a
five month period from December ninety one to April ninety two,
(20:57):
one hundred and fifty thousand little small waterbirds are called
what are those eared grebs?
Speaker 2 (21:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (21:05):
Is that? What was that? How we're pronouncing that?
Speaker 2 (21:07):
I was gonna say grevi's, but I think you nailed it.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
I'm not really sure, but they're little small waterbirds. And
one hundred and fifty thousand them died over five months.
Speaker 2 (21:15):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (21:15):
On the Saltan Sea. Another twenty thousand and ninety four
ten thousand white and brown pelicans died out in nineteen
ninety six, about ten thousand 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
(21:37):
sort of single die off of an endangered species to
ever happen.
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah. Yeah, and all this is going down on the
Saltan Sea.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Or the Telapia. Man, how about that stat?
Speaker 2 (21:47):
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 nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
How did they figure that, you know, I don't know.
Speaker 2 (22:03):
They must have counted one in like a square foot
and then multiplied it by a big mash or something.
Speaker 1 (22:08):
Yeah, by this case fish tacos. Maybe that was probably insensitive.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
What fish tacos?
Speaker 1 (22:17):
Well, I mean this is good for I don't eat
telapia much, but it's pretty good for a fish taco.
Speaker 2 (22:21):
Aren't they the rats of the sea?
Speaker 1 (22:23):
Yeah, I think so. I used to eat it more.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
I'll eat tilapia. I'm not that fancy. Oh oh yeah, yeah,
I'll eat tilapia right in front of you.
Speaker 1 (22:34):
Well, I'll be dining on my Chilean sea bass or
what was that something toothfish? Right?
Speaker 2 (22:40):
Did I forgot Patagonia? That's the real name for sea bass,
that's right, suckers. So yes, again, I think it's worth
restating eight million tilapia died in a single day in
nineteen ninety nine. The previous record before that had been
set the summer prior, and that was five hundred thousand
that died on a single day. So clearly things are
(23:03):
getting worse by the year. At the Sultan's Sea by
the time the nineties roll around.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
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 and a really saline body of water
can kill fish on mass. And that's exactly what was
going on as the salt and sea warmed, as summer
(23:50):
started to kind of get going. And there's like one
hundred and five degree August temperatures hot water. Warm water
carry 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.
(24:11):
And so fish die offs are just an annual part
of life around the salt and sea.
Speaker 1 (24:17):
Yeah, And I mean not only that, it's just losing
surface area. It's shrinking, so ten percent has been lost
in recent years. They're projecting forty percent by twenty thirty.
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,
(24:41):
you know, it's a bad scene. It's getting just salty
air over the years, it's getting more you know, chalk
full of more densely packed pesticides and things. And they're
saying that the salinity is probably going to increase another
maybe three times in the next ten years, basically kind
of taking care of anything else that might still be
living there.
Speaker 2 (24:59):
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
forty percent by twenty thirty. So things are getting dire here, right,
(25:21):
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 nineteen
eighty four because there was a flood from agricultural runoff.
And then I saw a really cool, eerie picture, Chuck.
(25:42):
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 like that, and
it looks like everybody kind of left the Saltan Sea
(26:04):
mid movie. It's really cool to see. I would strongly
suggest looking up that picture. I don't remember where I
saw it.
Speaker 1 (26:12):
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 roller coaster parks, amusement parks. We'll still go to
the Sultan Sea to kind of check things out. And
(26:34):
one of these videos it's from the Gnarly Speed Shop,
and I think if you just look up abandoned cars
that drive in on YouTube Gnarly speed Shop, they do
a cool video sort of walk through 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
(26:57):
frame because I guess it's kind of closest to the road,
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 what
was possible, which is very creepy. I don't know if
that was like a message to a long lost love
or if it was, you know, relating to the Saltan
(27:17):
Sea and what happened there. But it's 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 middle of a movie. I think people
just like went and like park their cars in this
abandoned lot, is what happened?
Speaker 2 (27:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (27:36):
You know, think you thought I didn't think you thought that.
Speaker 2 (27:38):
So I remembered where I saw it, Chuck. I saw
it on a slide show on all that's interesting. Great, 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?
Speaker 1 (27:52):
Yeah, let's do it.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
Okay, stuff you shout.
Speaker 1 (28:04):
Lately, I've been learning some stop about in Saunia or Aluminia.
How about the one on border like sorder that or
yacht border? Heard that one before, but it was so nice, Arnes,
Why except nobody listen up? Stop stop stop?
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Okay, Chuck. So the Sultan 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
(28:58):
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 Saltan 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
(29:19):
this is the state of the Salton seasons. People are like,
we need to do something about this. And for years
and years, starting in the early late nineties early two thousands,
the idea was, let's just restore it to its former glory.
And that idea became a non starter essentially for the
(29:40):
next couple 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.
Speaker 1 (29:50):
Yeah there, we'll talk about a bunch of the stops
and starts over the years. In two thousand and three,
the water Districts of Southern California signed off That was
this deal that they had been negotiating for years called
the Quantification Settlement Agreement of QSA, And basically what they
were trying to get done was say, hey, let's once
(30:11):
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 the
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, and in exchange, those areas
would say, all right, now, what we're gonna do is
(30:33):
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 waste water, 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.
Speaker 2 (30:53):
Right. So, the problem as far as the Salton Sea
is concerned that agricultural runoff, remember was keeping it going. Yeah,
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 salt and sea any longer.
(31:14):
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 salt
and sea for fifteen years.
Speaker 1 (31:27):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
They even paid the farmers to leave some of their
land fallow so they could direct that water to the
Sultan Sea. In retrospect, that seems like total madness. They
were essentially wasting all of that water, but it actually
turned out to be pressy, and 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.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
It's sort of like leaving the water on in your
tub with the drain slightly open, yeah, and just being like,
we're just going to leave the tub water on for
fifteen years so we can keep this body of water.
Speaker 2 (32:00):
Yes, but your tub you got from an abandoned house, right,
and it had it has bath water that's one hundred
years old and full of pollutants and algae, and you're
just running your water into it.
Speaker 1 (32:13):
Yeah, So it's a horror movie tub.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
It's a yes, exactly, that's exactly what it is.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
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. 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
(32:39):
eventually might happen, But it's still a habitat. It's still
a migratory stop for birds on that fly route, right,
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 Salt and Sea was
as sad as it was was like an oasis for
them on right.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, that is sad because if the salt and Sea
is the more attractive option, because that's all that's left,
those poor birds are in trouble. It's not just the
birds that are in trouble. There are people that still
live around there. In fact, I was really surprised to
find the Salt and City, which I believe is the
biggest town along the Salt and Sea. It's on the
(33:21):
northwest shore. Their population actually increased since the twenty twenty
census by almost one thousand people, which are like wow,
a thousand people who cares well, They were less than
six thousand in population at the time of the twenty
twenty census, So people are moving there because the housing
is so affordable it's insane. So there's people. There's in
(33:42):
the whole region, there's something like six hundred and fifty
thousand people, and all of those people are at tremendous
risk right now of a cornucopia of health hazards that
are starting to develop because of the salt and sea
evaporates more and more and more because off isn't sustaining
it anymore, and it's so hot that exposed sea bed
(34:05):
or lake bed that's so chock full of toxins that
you can barely look at it is turning to dust
that's getting blown off into the surrounding areas and causing
all sorts of problems.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Yeah, asthma. They've already found an uptick in asthma. There's
a doctor named Jill Johnson, a PhD who's an assistant
professor of preventative medicine at Southern cal and she's working
on a research project called the Saltan Sea in Children's
Health colon assessing Imperial Valley respiratory health and environment. In
(34:39):
the environment along with partner show Rey Farzan and other PhD.
And they're basically following elementary school children in that area
and are seeing how their health is advancing and right
now pretty bad asthma rates and haven't proved causation yet,
but it seems like it's probably.
Speaker 2 (35:00):
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. Yeah,
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
(35:20):
there's metals, pesticides, DDT has 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.
Speaker 1 (35:43):
Yeah, And that's that's just like health issues. There's also
like a financial impact. There was a study about eleven
years ago or so from the Pacific Institute. They're a
think tank in Oakland that deals with water policy, and
and they said the financial toll could be as much
as seventy billion dollars over the next thirty years, right,
(36:04):
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, twenty five years, has had various stops
and starts with funding for different projects that will get
(36:26):
approved and then the money just gets diverted or never
shows up.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Yeah, and especially before that twenty fourteen study from the
Pacific Institute, people are like this, eight billion dollars seems
like a little much to restore the salt and 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
(36:53):
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 Sultan Sea. Yeah,
the political will just hasn't been there. And one of
the things you could do if you were a senator,
a congress person, a governor, you could fully go after
a bunch of funds to save the Sultan Sea and
(37:15):
remediate the area and get it back to its former glory.
And then your legislature would say, no, we're not funding that.
You'd be like, oh, man, I tried. And that seems
like what the pattern was for the first like about
twenty ish years, maybe a little more than that that
people started coming up with ideas to do something about this.
Speaker 1 (37:36):
Yeah, Gray Davis, when he was governor in two thousand
and three assigned the Saltan Sea Record I'm sorry, Restoration
Act and the Saltan Sea Restoration Fund, but that didn't
receive funding. So a fund without funding is not a fund. No,
just like a sea without an outlet as a lake. Right, yes, absolutely,
(37:56):
all right. In two thousand and seven, the Corp of Engineers,
the Army Corps Engineers, got authorization to spend up to
thirty million on projects. The money was finally appropriated in
twenty fifteen, and the Obama administration spent a couple of
hundred grand is all on a study, another study.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Even that was the thirty million, that's what it turned
out to be from what I can tell, it went
from thirty million dollars to two hundred thousand dollars and
it was for another study. Isn't that crazy?
Speaker 1 (38:24):
Yeah? I mean none of this, though, is going to
make any difference. I mean even a thirty million dollar thing,
or I think there was one plan. Yeah, a ten
year Saltan sea plan to cost three hundred and eighty
three million. But that's not even for restoration, because, like
you said, that ship is sailed. It is a multi
(38:44):
multi billion dollar thing if they want to get this
thing back to the California riviera. So right, it doesn't
seem like that's just ever going to happen. It's not empossible.
Speaker 2 (38:52):
No, So now they're looking at restoring parts of it
to turn it back into wetlands for birds. Right, And
that ten year plan is estimated to cost three hundred
and eighty three million dollars.
Speaker 1 (39:04):
Just to do that.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, And it looked like it was just going to
be another pie in the sky, a proposal that would
never get funding. But California came up with something like
two hundred million dollars of that. They're under Devin Newsom.
In the last couple of years. It has been huge,
crazy movements compared to what had been done in the
last couple of decades, and California came up with two
(39:27):
hundred million dollars out of nowhere. Mind bogglingly, the federal
government chipped in another two hundred and forty million dollars
two hundred and forty five So now this project that
needed three hundred and eighty three million has almost half
a billion. So not only are they now on the
salt and sea saying like, you know, when are we
(39:47):
ever going to be able to do anything about this too,
we can actually do more than we wanted to do
in our ten year plan. The things are starting to
pick up, and they're starting to restore wetlands, and it
actually looks like it's going to not be quite the
ecological disaster that it would have been California just sat
on its hands.
Speaker 1 (40:08):
Yeah. I think between twenty and three and twenty sixteen,
just a few dozen acres of the wetland were restored.
Since then about two thousand more, and the Species Conservation
Habitat Project has a plan over the next decade to
restore another nine thousand acres, so that'd be like roughly
(40:28):
twelve thousand 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
(40:49):
means there's some hotspots there, and so some people are saying, hey,
let's put a few billion dollars toward a geothermal electricity plant. Yeah,
mine some lithium.
Speaker 2 (41:02):
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 twenty first century gold because 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 it's a lithium mine there, And of course they're
(41:24):
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. 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
(41:46):
worse than it was. But my money is definitely on
them lithium mining.
Speaker 1 (41:51):
Yeah, agreed.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
There's a couple other things that are noteworthy about the Sultancy.
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, Oh yeah, some
of them are actually true. The Navy used to use
(42:13):
the salt and sea to drop test bombs or dummy bombs,
to basically train their bomber pilots how to drop bombs,
and they actually supposedly practiced for the atomic bomb drops
and they are so there's dummy bombs under the salt
and sea still, and of course locals are like, that's
just a cover story. They actually lost an atomic bomb
(42:33):
and that's what's hiding there. There's an undetonated atomic bomb
under there. Now, there are a bunch of Navy planes
that dig crash. I think eighteen flyers died over the years,
but there's twenty four planes sunken in the Salt and
Sea right now. And then there's this one really weird
legend that predates the Salt and Sea. It's the Lost
(42:55):
Ship of the Desert. Have you ever heard of that?
Speaker 1 (42:58):
Never heard of it?
Speaker 2 (42:59):
Well, it's a apparently this legendary lower that there was
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
Salt and Basin, which is now underneath the Salt and Sea.
(43:23):
So there's this whole idea that there's a Viking ship
potentially under there too.
Speaker 1 (43:28):
Wow. Yeah, there's a great dive bar the ski In right, Yeah,
it's in that video they go to ski In and
play creepy old piano and have some beer. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
They call it the lowest dive bar in the Western
Hemisphere because it is two hundred and thirty seven feet
below sea level.
Speaker 1 (43:45):
I think, yeah, right there at the I don't know
if they still call it Bombay Beach or if they
took that name away. But Bombay non beach because of
beach without water is not a beach, right.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
There's also it's attracted a lot of artists too, like
a 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 that's kind of turning it into a
(44:20):
really neat, weird, decrepit art place.
Speaker 1 (44:25):
Cool.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 1 (44:29):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 2 (44:30):
Okay, Well, let's it for the sull and see everybody
will have to keep an eye on it and see
what happens. And in the meantime, I think it's time
for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (44:39):
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,
(45:02):
not too long ago. And Ben's awesome songs for Sleeping
Dogs is great. It's this very vibey instrumental. I think
you dig it actually, and so yeah, go check it out,
yeah wherever you get music.
Speaker 2 (45:16):
Basically, yes, Ben is probably our most beloved stuff you
should remember because he's just so cool and chill and nice.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Whoa yeah you say that in front of Jerry. Okay,
all right, listener to mail time. We got a couple
of in the next couple of episodes on MTV VH
one 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
(45:46):
that like the next week MTV would fold. Basically, yeah,
it's music channels. It was just one of those strange
stuff you should know, things that happened sometimes I.
Speaker 2 (45:54):
Didn't quite understand, so like it was just its music channels.
I didn't know that it had any music channels left.
Speaker 1 (46:01):
Yeah, I think we talked about that, that there was
still some music happening. Well, Jerry just buzzed in and said,
it's just in Europe, So I don't know what to believe.
Speaker 2 (46:09):
Now, Well, they definitely did something and it was right
after our episode for sure.
Speaker 1 (46:14):
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 MTB.
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. In College Circle two thousand, it
(46:37):
was called the MTB 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 and the way we watch.
Speaker 2 (46:52):
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 a eight
second cut.
Speaker 1 (47:05):
Maybe. I mean, I remember people talking about like quickcut
because of music videos, like it was a thing. That
is from Chris Singleton, who is an ops manager for
Independence Rock Media.
Speaker 2 (47:16):
Very nice, So Chris knows what they're talking about.
Speaker 1 (47:19):
I think so well.
Speaker 2 (47:20):
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 eat you toob Yeah you can. Yes,
we want to hear from Bono and the Edge and
the other guys.
Speaker 1 (47:32):
No, boy, what Madam and Larry come on, there you go.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
Thank you. I could have come up with those given
a couple of months, for sure.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Sure.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
So yeah, if you want to be like the band,
you two, you can email us at stuff Podcasts at
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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