Endless Thread - PARKS! Pt. 4: Death Sea

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

A Redditor proposed a quick fix to one of humanity’s greatest threats. But the real threat may be our fixation with quick fixes. Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mixing and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Amory Sivertson and Ben Brock Johnson are the co-hosts. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images)

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WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Amory, Ben. Ranger Dean. Ranger Dean. All right. What is the biggest construction project that you can think of? Like, in all of humanity, what tops the list? The pyramids?

Yeah, but that was built by aliens. Not human. In all of humanity. Yeah. Yeah. One of Elon Musk's completely failed tunneling experiments. Yeah. I look this up and the real answer to this is kind of sort of the Great Wall of China.

Oh, duh. The only one you can see from space or whatever you can see from space. Exactly. Okay. Yeah. But I have a proposal. construction project that could be bigger. Something that could help combat one of the greatest threats to our world.

The greatest threat to our world. Running out of popcorn, I'm high up there. Some sort of large popcorn maker. I'm talking about climate change. Specifically, it could address one giant problem caused by climate change. Sea levels are rising. Sea levels are rising. Rising sea levels.

The sea level rise is accelerating. Just a few fast facts here. By 2050 on our current trajectory, the boot of Louisiana loses its toes. By 2080, the areas around Savannah, Georgia, Ho Chi Minh, Kolkata, huge populations underwater. By 2,100 in the worst-case scenario,

an estimated 2 billion people could become refugees, just from sea level rise alone. Even our beloved city of Boston turns into an archipelago and WBUR becomes waterfront property. You could go for a lunchtime swim. And I would.

Maybe I'll finally learn how to swim. Silver linings, I guess. So setting that aside, all pretty miserable, right? Yeah. What if I told you, though, that one wild idea from Reddit could make all of that Just go away.

You would just need to give up a tiny something in return. From the Avaluads Mountains, which form the southern barrier, just a little bit of dirt that no one cares about. This fascinating valley of color and sunshine contains nearly 3,000 square miles. An enormous pit that no one needs. About 550 square miles are below the level of the sea. So unpleasant, so useless, so fatal, that it earned the name. Death Valley. Today, we're going to take all that excess water from sea level rise, and instead of letting our cities drown, we're going to pour it into Death Valley National Park.

Somebody get a picture. I'm Dean, whose name auto corrects to death, Russell. I'm Amory Sebertson, whose name auto corrects to too many ridiculous things. And I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and Google knows my name. And you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's Waterfront NPR station. Today's episode, The Last in Our Park Series, about the outdoors online. Producer Dean Russell dives into the internet's wild idea for resisting climate change. This is... Death sea.

Death sea. Okay. So I saw this question pop up a little while ago on the subreddit Ask Science. And I have been eager for the right moment to... weighed in. Here's the question. Death Valley is 282 feet below sea level. Would it offset the rising ocean to build a canal and create the Death Valley Sea? Death Valley National Park, which is located in the Mojave Desert in California and Nevada, is the largest park in the contiguous U.S., 3.4 million acres of desert. It's also the hottest and driest.

and lowest park. So this question is basically like, you know, what if we built a canal from the Pacific Ocean and just filled this thing up? 8,000 upfotes on it, tons of comments. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's a beach, it's like a beach project, you know?

Just get your little plastic bucket and your little plastic shovel out and make sure you're well hydrated with some watermelon from the cooler and you're good to go. I feel like it can't be that simple. The problem seems too big. Like Death Valley is big, but the problem is maybe much bigger.

So the way I and Reddit's Ask Science approached this question was kind of like, all right, not a huge fan of destruction for destruction's sake. But if we do have a solution, maybe we should consider it. I mean, what is so great about Death Valley? People imagine that it's a valueless place or that it's a broken version of something else. This is Chris Clark by day. He works for the National Parks Conservation Association. And at night. At night, I am co-host of the 90 Miles from Needles podcast.

That is a podcast dedicated to protecting the desert. Oh, we're going to have to get rid of that first. Chris lives not far from Death Valley in Southern California. He has heard this idea like a number of times, and he took a close look at the Reddit thread. First reaction? I definitely encourage anyone that's thinking of filling Death Valley with water to visit first and see what's there.

So I thought we would start there. Like, let's visit Death Valley. Yeah, let me just get that dad hat with the little blanket on the back of it. It goes over my neck. I got the sunscreen. J.K. I don't want to go stand around in Death Valley right now because... First off, you're not going to be standing there for very long if you have any sense because it's somewhere around 120 degrees on a cool day right now. It's pretty hot. Like, hard to comprehend hot.

You may have seen the news about, you know, so-called heat tourism and how it's become a trend. Yeah. So depressing to look at those stories and watch those videos of people like giddly running into a furnace. When you get out of your air-conditioned car or out of your air-conditioned home or office, kind of almost takes your breath away, like jumping into really cold water, but it's just the heat and your body goes, wow. That's another guy I talked to, Kevin Wilson, aquatic ecologists for Death Valley National Park. Yes, they do have fish.

Kevin, surprise, surprise, also not a fan of this proposal. My knee-jerk reaction without my scientist hat or NPS head is like, whoa, that's crazy. Crazy, but not so crazy, it's unimaginable. So wait, did you ask them to dive? Were you like, will you please read these internet opinions? I sent this question to a lot of experts. Kevin and Chris were the only people who agreed to look at it carefully. Kevin and Chris, who weren't the only people to respond to me,

they took a look at this thread, and the most obvious reason for not flooding it wasn't even mentioned. It's beautiful. You really start, you know, with this creosote shrub land, and then as you descend from, we call it the 3,000 point level, down into the park, it becomes more sparse of vegetation, and the vegetation changes there. You can really see all the different layers of rock,

the different types of rock. And so it becomes, you know, kind of like a moonscape. At the bottom of Death Valley is a glistening salt flat, surrounded by mountains. And yes, it is quite beautiful. I've actually been here. But it wasn't always a beautiful desert because it was basically made to hold water.

During the ice ages, Death Valley was full of water, well above sea level. 300 feet above sea level. Sounds like a good holding tank. Let's fill her up. There were year-round flowing streams and cutthroat trout in those streams. And there are Native American ruins that used to surround the old lakeshore, essentially. It wasn't until about 10,000 years ago that the earth warmed and, in Death Valley dried up.

And so the argument that it's beautiful as a desert and we should preserve it as a desert that kind of felt more philosophical than scientific to me. So I reached out to some Redditors to see if they could help me understand this problem. More on that in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of. of stories. Stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you

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Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. All right. We're digging into a hypothetical posted on Reddit in the name of saving the planet from rising sea levels caused by climate change. You know, just an easy, breezy thought experiment. No pressure, us. What would happen if we flooded Death Valley National Park? Right.

The top comment on this Reddit thread is also the most thorough. So I want to go through it. Written by the user, Crystal Trudger. Wait, hold on. Hold on. That might be better than Ranger Dean. Yeah. Yeah, that is really good, Crestle Trudger.

I don't know what that means at all. But you kind of do, though, in a way. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's one of those names where you're like, I don't know, but I know. You know? So I reached out to Custle, who actually turned out to be a mod on Ask Science. And when I asked him to come on to the show, he was like, I'm a geologist, not a hydrologist.

Potato, potato, Crestle Trudger. Yes, and no. I mean, the truth is there's no perfect occupation to answer this strange hypothetical question. But anyway, Crestle was super nice, and he was willing to give me a little bit of background on this. Like, first he said that a version of this question was actually getting submitted to Ask Science, like, every week. Like, it was a running joke among the mods. Like, which random basin do people want to fill? Today. So part of what got Crustle to respond was just the sheer annoyance of getting this question over and over again. But yes, also the great scientific impulse to share knowledge. So Crestle gave himself like an hour to write out a proper answer. Could Death Sea solve the problem of sea level rise? What do you think Crestle said?

I think they started with well actually. I think they said no way. Yep. They said no. For three major scientific reasons. No plastic bucket, no plastic shovel, and no watermelon. So I'm going to send this to you. I'm going to ask you to read it. Okay. Reason number one, Ben. They wrote, it would be ridiculously expensive. Okay. But I mean, you know. Someone go look at our defense budget and come back to me.

I was just going to say, I was just going to say there's no shortage of money. in this world if we really want to solve problems. Yeah. Well, okay, I wanted to know, like, how much would it actually cost, right? Like, the most cost-effective way of approaching this would be to build a pipeline, not a canal, from the Gulf of California to Death Valley. And according to Crustle, that's about 220-some miles. It would go over two mountain ranges.

And you could just pump the water as is, but the southwest is droughts. So it might be more beneficial if we desalinated it. And then we could use that water. So all of that together, you know, how much does that cost? Crystal didn't actually have an exact figure. But I looked this up and it just so happens that last year, Arizona began considering a very similar project. 200-mile water pipeline from the Gulf to the southwest with some added desalination. Huh.

Okay. Price tag, $5 billion for one single pipeline. Chump change for America. Yeah, just put it on Elon Musk's tab. He's got this. Yes, please put it on his tab. He sneezed that this morning. I think you both have the right idea.

Just to throw it out there. I also looked up, you know, the estimated cost of sea level rise, and that's going to look like something like $14 trillion. Seems higher. Seems like a higher number. Okay, problem number two, Crestle Trudger wrote, quote, the ocean is large. Shocking, right? Yeah. I love this person.

Water's wet. Grass is green. So in the last 10 years, the ocean has risen at an average rate of 4.6 millimeters a year. Oh, what are we worried about? Yeah, sure. It sounds slow, but it's also kind of. not. Like the previous decade was something like 2.3 millimeters a year, and so the rate is accelerating. And then like on top of that, sea level rise is, you know, irreversible, at least on any

human time scale. So with that in mind, how much sea level rise would Death Valley offset? I've actually crunched some of the numbers. Again, that's Chris Clark, Desert Hero. He approached this question similarly to Crustle Trudger, math. There is about 355 square miles of Death Valley that is at or below sea level. So it's not all 282 feet deep. Some of it is four inches deep. Basically, he's saying that Death Valley isn't a rectangular box.

But if it was, it would only be 355 square miles that are 70 feet deep, not 200 plus feet deep. It's still pretty deep. You know, how much water would that hold? About four and a half cubic miles of water. Not the amount of water that we probably needed to hold. This would counter about a week of sea level rise. Now, Crestle worked with more generous numbers, I should say,

but even they found that the Death Sea would just offset two millimeters of sea level rise. So not really worth it. Not really worth it. But there was pushback on Reddit. Opinions? No. A couple people pointed out that, hey, maybe it won't offset sea level rise, but it could help our drought problem.

So let's just make it a reservoir. I called up hydrologist Huri Ajami at UC Riverside. Her first reaction? As human being, we are trying to dominate the nature. I mean, what's the point of creating? you know, another Salton Sea. I am admittedly not familiar with the Salton Sea. I didn't know this as well.

It's an interesting sidebar and it got some mentions on the Reddit thread. The Salton Sea is Hori's specialty and it's an apt analog for the Death Sea because... Salton Sea actually is one of the largest lakes in California that historically has been around for thousands of years. Once upon a time, the Salton Sea was a natural sea in Southern California. But similar to Death Valley, it started to dry up until white settlers came along. These folks built up agriculture, created irrigation canals with dams. They dammed the nearby Colorado River. This is what Rachel Carson, who wrote Silent Spring.

This is what she calls the control of nature. But controlling nature is hard. And in 1905, there was a large flood event that broke one of the dams and irrigation canals. And that resulted in creation of the Salton Sea in a kind of a permanent form. I feel like it should almost be a song about the Salton Sea. Oh, yeah. Once upon the time the Salton Sea was a natural sea in Southern California. You know what I mean?

Something like that. Yeah, yeah. Oh, man. I feel like we are laughing. We are going in this ridiculous direction so we don't cry. I know. I know. Because this is really just like the most depressing thought experiment.

But I support it. Let's just all sing along. What's about a salt in the saltland sea? It was a natural sea in Southern California. California. So I have some good news. Oh, good. Yeah.

I mean, just as we could turn Death Valley back into a watery place, humans recreated the Salton Sea, and it was actually kind of nice. During 70s, this area was a great. A lot of tourists were coming. Also, because the Salton Sea kind of lies in the Pacific Flyway, this region was one of the major habitats for the migrating birds coming from Alaska. or South America. But there were a lot of agricultural chemicals that were draining to the Salton Sea. And in the 1980s, the sea started drying up. It was getting less water from the Colorado River and it was evaporating faster.

And all that toxic stuff like lead and DDT, that stuck around, meaning the concentration of that stuff increased. And as the sea level is declining, that will expose the lake bed with lots of toxic sediment. And because of the wind, this toxic sediment has been spreading through the region. Today, if you go there, you'll see dead fish in the water, toxic dust in the air. Massive bird die-offs have happened. And it's considered one of the worst ecological disasters in U.S. history.

It's very sad when you go there. It's like a dead city to be. be honest with you. And unfortunately, because of all these contaminants that are draining to the sea, it smells very bad, particularly during summertime. What does it smell like? A rotten egg. I'm feeling less sing-songy all of a sudden. Yeah. So you're saying that if we flooded Death Valley, it could end up like the Salton Sea? Probably not exactly, but it would be destructive, which brings me to our third and final point. What would be the impact to the environment in Death Valley?

As Kevin Wilson, the park ecologist, made clear, Death Valley is a pretty inaccurate name. Seems like an oxymoron, but we do have a lot of fishes in over 800 springs as well. There are big horn sheep, tortoises, jack rabbits, roadrunners, and Chris Clark told me there are also... Forty-two plant species that are restricted to the Death Valley area only found in the neighborhood. About 28 animal species only found around Death Valley.

All of the plants and animals have evolved in this extreme environment. So if we're going to pump this water that the animals and plants have not grown up with, it would have devastating environmental consequences. I mean, this is the price you pay. Wow. Cold-hearted. Cold-hearted. Goodbye, big horn sheep.

Well, a couple of clams are going to die. when you do your little beach, your beach dig, you know? I mean, it does sound, I mean, I'm with you. It sounds cold-hearted, but also, like, we can let the oceans rise and wipe out whatever they wipe out, or we can try to come up with our own solutions, which will wipe out whatever it wipes out. Yeah. Either way, things are getting wiped out.

So, like, what is the right answer here? It's all bad. Basically, what I'm saying is there are only bad options. Yeah. It's also like, you know, we might as well accept the reality that it's been us or them for a long time when it comes to humans and all other species. And we might as well just start acknowledging that no matter what we do, we are going to try to self-preserve. And the result of that is going to be the destruction of other wildlife. Yeah, I mean, I hear the struggle.

I hear the struggle. But I would emphasize that self-preservation isn't inherently destructive, even if his, historically, you know, which is your point, historically it has been. And, you know, not all the options have to be bad. Like, they're definitely hard, but, you know, of the ideas that are hard to get around, like Death Valley C is pretty terrible, ranks pretty high on the terrible factor. Because, right, like, as we went through, it's ineffective, it's expensive, it's deadly. But even if we don't flood Death Valley, this.

This desert isn't going to stay the same because of the problem that we are talking about because of climate change. In recent years, it's had record levels of heat, 128 degrees, 130 degrees. They have had nights that don't drop below 116 degrees. Two people died from heat in the park this year. and it's not just hard for humans. Getting small hawks landing in our yard, just looking for a bit of shade and breathing really hard, and it's clear that they are having a lot of trouble.

It's been really, really tough on any kind of animal that can't burrow into the ground to stay cool. Trees are dying. Precipitation is changing, so it's even drier. Or like what just happened in Death Valley with Tropical Storm Hillary, you get a ton of rain all at once, which causes flash floods. And the heat, the heat is just going to get worse. So the question is, you know, can the plants and animals adapt quickly enough to rapid changes in the climate?

Some will, some won't be able to. Moments ago, I mentioned the phrase control of nature. Every time we control nature, whether on purpose or not, we see unexpected, So you might say that the best thing for us to do is to back off. Let nature be nature, right? But we've already controlled and in turn damaged the planet so much that nature actually needs our help. The writer Elizabeth Colbert calls this the control of the control of nature. People are going to have to find new habitats for some of the creatures as their home in Death Valley becomes hotter and drier and

ultimately uninhabitable. The only thing that could prevent Death Valley from changing too much, the only thing that could prevent the seas from rising too much, is not a cool, unique fix like flooding some random desert. It's a pretty boring fix.

One we've known about for decades. We have to use less energy. We have to eat, less meat. We have to go electric. We have to pressure our legislators. We have to stop giving our money to the guilty fossil fuel companies. We have to think about what we are doing every single day

and not tune it out because we are too sad or overwhelmed or ashamed. We have to change. Otherwise, all these parks that we have been talking about in this series, they are only going to exist online as memories. Well, Dean, I still think we should all get our plastic buckets and shovels out. I'll bring the watermelon. But I, yeah, I appreciate you bringing us this story,

especially as the last in our series, because it sort of like reminds us that stuff is not here forever. And to me, you know, I annoyingly keep coming back to this idea that like national parks are kind of like one of the greatest American ideas, in my opinion. And I think in part that is because

when we connect with nature in a very sort of like visceral and genuine way, we understand our stewardship. And to me, that is the only way that we are going to actually survive in any way climate change and be happy with the results or at least okay with the results. Yeah, I guess my feeling is solving the problem is much bigger than any one of us. And yet, I will say, as someone who has been trying to chip away at different parts of my life and just focus on my own ecological footprint in a moment when I feel pretty powerless to do something bigger or like what I'm doing to try to affect greater change isn't working, it still feels good to, to, to, to, to take charge over your own relationship with nature, your own relationship to the planet, and try to make little differences. So to the people out there who are like, no, we can't do anything about it.

I hear you, but also don't let yourself off the hook. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. This episode was written and produced by Dean Krustle-Trudger Russell. Ranger Dean. Ranger Dean. It is co-hosted by myself, Ben Brock Johnson. And by me, Amory Severson, and by Dean Russell. Dean Crestle, Trudger Russell.

Trudger Russell. Yeah. Mix and sound design by Paul Vicus. The rest of our team is Emily Jankowski, Matt Reed, Grace Tatter, Quincy Walters, and Summa to Joshi. This wraps our park series, folks. We will be back with regular programming next week. time, get out of here. What are you doing? Go get outside. Get outside. Go get in the park, would you? Go jump in a pond. Hug a tree. Hug a tree.

Identify a rare species of slime. Yeah. Get your slime mold on. We sound like we really need to get out there too. That's the energy we're giving off. Let's go. Let's get out of here. All right. Bye. Okay. Bye.