Stuff You Should Know - Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea

Episode Date: November 11, 2025

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

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be reasonable or shady with us each and every Monday. Listen to reasonably shady from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of IHeart Radio. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is stuff you should know. It's a little bit of a jazzy earth science edition, I think. Yeah.

And, I mean, we might as well get into it because I just told Jerry the name of this was Salton Lake. Mm-hmm. And even though it's called the Salton Sea. Right. Which is a, it's an inland lake in Imperial in Coachella valleys in Riverside and Imperial County in California, Southern California.

But, and I said it's not really a sea. and you said it's an inlacy, then he said, save it. And said, this is gold. I didn't say save it like that. Well, no, I mean, I'm not going to do my Josh impression. You just did a really mean Josh impression. Save it. No, no, no.

So I guess we need to determine this. Why do they call it a sea? I mean, it's an inland sea. I don't know. I just know that most people call it that. I failed to go look up whether it is a sea or a lake. I mean, I don't think it's a inland sea. it has any outlet to the ocean anymore, right?

No, not anymore. We're going to talk about that. 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, good point.

If I'm not mistaken, I might be wrong about that. I didn't look it up, 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 Salton Lake. Well, now all their pamphlets just say don't even bother coming here. Right. To the Salton Sea, that is, not in California.

I love California. Exactly. And the reason that they would have pamphlets that say don't come here is because the Salton Sea is a genuine ecological disaster. 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 a so-so movie starring Val Kilmer back. in the late 90s or early 2000s. I think it was early 2000s. It was okay. I saw it. The extra supporting character was meth. Yeah. It was very methy.

Yeah, I've been here, by the way. I was wondering that. Yeah, on my big out-west trip many years ago after college, where I spent several months driving around with my best friend, Brett. We went through the Salton Sea, and it wasn't great. back then, I imagine it's, well, it sounds like it's even worse now, but when did we talk about this before? Was it desertification? Oh, maybe. Because I know we've talked about it. That doesn't ring a bell. But I mean, so much so that I was convinced we did a whole episode, but it could

have been one of our ill-conceived videos that we used to do. That's possible, too, because I think I could see us taking the angle that there were ghost towns there. Oh, okay. You know, because there's a lot of ghost towns there. There's a lot of ghost towns there. 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 Salton Sea even came to be because that is an interesting story in and of itself.

Yeah, it totally is. It's in the Salton Basin, and that's S-A-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 it, one point, the Gulf of California, but it was, it was, there were other seas before this sea or lakes, if you want to go that route. 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 40,000 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 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? You asking me? I think so. So that would make the Colorado River a sea. But it flows into there, and every once in a while,

there's a lot of snow melt, there's a lot of rain, and the Colorado River will flood its banks so much that a bunch of it gets diverted, into the Salton Basin, forming one of the Salton seas over time. Yeah, for a while, like you said, you know, it could be there for a while. Eventually, it's out in the middle of the desert, so eventually it's going to evaporate. Right.

But as the river flowed in there, it carried a lot of silt 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. Right. And, 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 just, it was this kind of weird geological cycle. I mean, I'm sure this has happened elsewhere, but this seems

particularly noteworthy for this area. 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 Kahulah, which formed about 1,300 years ago, as well as geologists can tell. And it stuck around for hundreds of years, possibly up into the 1500s. And at one point in the 1500s, it flooded. So it was already there. And it grew to about 26 times the size of the Salton Sea. 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 Lake Erie. Okay. For our Canadian listeners, it's four times larger than the capital city of Ottawa. For our European listeners, that's larger than Belgium. Okay. In the UK, that's bigger than Wales. In Australia, that's two times the greater Sydney metro area. And for our friends in California, that's 26 times the size of the Salton Sea.

Wow. You did your homework. I did. Is there a program that you use, like, just like Josh converts.com? There are, yeah, I make like $12 a month on web ads. That's great. No, there's websites that says, like, they're called like the size of or something like that. So usually it's type in what's the size of 10,000 square miles, which is what that would be.

Is the landing page just a banana? Yes. It starts from there. Yeah. Where did that come from using a banana for scale? Do you know? Oh, I don't know. I never, I mean, who starts any of these things?

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. No, it's just an Internet thing, you know? Okay. So Ron's doing all of that stuff. Get old Ron. He comes up with the best memes. All right.

And 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 is going to solve that problem. So in the early 1900s, the Imperial Canal was built to say, hey, let's divert some of that Colorado River toward us so we can have drinking water and so we can irrigate this. rich, rich soil that lies beneath our feet, 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 moving body of water. And that eventually happened to the canal, like, in a bad way, not too long after they opened 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. The problem was because they thought it was going to be temporary, they didn't install the proper head gates. Head gates control the flow of water in a canal. So that means that the water in that bypass was literally out of control, which was fine. They dug it well enough that under normal circumstances, the water was flowing. normally. But the year after they dug that bypass, it stayed around longer than expected. And the year after, there were some genuinely abnormal circumstances that caused a huge problem for everybody. Yeah, it rained a lot. A big rainy season. And then, you know, snow melt in the

Rockies can always be a problem if it was extra. And that year it was extra coinciding with those rains. The Colorado River swole up again. And it, you know, did what water does. It goes downriver in a pretty impactful way and really overwhelmed that temporary channel that they were using to divert around the clog canal. Yeah. 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. Yeah. So essentially, Colorado River decided, I'll go this way instead. So it actually changed its course from the way that it had been going for millennia to this way directly into the Salton Sea. And it started flowing so fast that 90,000 cubic feet

of water per second was flowing into the Salton Sea, right? That is the size of an Olympic-sized pool, that much water, flowing in every second. Yeah. And for our friends in the north, that's an Olympic-sized pool. Right? Yeah, I'm not going to keep going. Well, what about our friends who like McDonald's? Oh, I mean, if you did a Big Mac conversion, that's really going the extra mile. It is exactly 2,295,918 Big Macs all flowing into this Salton Sea per second.

So delicious. It does seem delicious, but imagine them all kind of flowing at once and smacking into another. It'd probably get kind of gross. 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 U.S. government got involved. The Southern Pacific Railroad got involved. They fully sealed it in 1907, but that's like, what, three years later. And, you know, by that point it's too late. They were like, all right, now we got a 400 square mile inland sea or lake, depending on who's podcasting, many years from now. 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 2,057 carloads of rock, 221 carloads of gravel, and 203 carloads of clay, all dumped into one spot to finally fill that breach. That's what it took. That's how big of a breach it was. How many Big Macs? A lot. I didn't do that one. Sorry. It's okay. Should we take a break now or is that a, should we, it seems like a good time for a break. Yeah, the Salton Sea is now there. The breach has been sealed and people are saying, what the heck are we going to do with this?

Yeah, we're going to water ski eventually. So we'll come back and talk about that right after this. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dabolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I have scurvy at 3 a.m? On Health Stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health.

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How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet birth order. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's stuff, it's stuff, it's stuff, it's stuff. All right, so when we last left you,

human experimentation and sort of error and rain and snow melt caused a 400 square mile, almost 35 mile long and 15 mile wide, about 30 foot deep on average lake to form in the middle of the California desert. 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've got to have runoff. And so they're running this irrigation water off into the lake, which basically it's like, hey, we're putting at least as much water as you're evaporating. So you're not going anywhere. No, yeah, that's right. So it stabilized the lake indefinitely, just the agricultural runoff. One of the other things, the other impacts that this had, because they started doing that in the 20s, is that agricultural runoff is chock full of salt, which I didn't realize. But irrigation produces a lot of salt, and that stuff is flowing right into the salt in, and it turned it salty. Today, I saw anywhere between one-third or 50% more salty than the Pacific Ocean. The Salton Sea has become because of all that introduction.

So it started freshwater, and then because of agricultural runoff, it turned into a saltwater inland sea-slash-lake. That's right. And because it's located along the Pacific Flyway, which is a great migratory bird route, the birds were like, hey, this is great. Now there's water here. The locals were like, we should put some fish in here. So they stocked it with tilapia, a lot of tilapia. And sport fish for sport fishing. And of course, the birds love that even more.

So all of a sudden, by the 1930s, you have a sort of a brand new wildlife refuge forming, such that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service even created the Salton Sea Wildlife Refuge to protect all the stuff that was there now. Yeah. So when the Salton Sea first formed, Everybody's like, this is actually kind of great. This is a mistake that turned really wonderful for everybody. We turned river water into lemonade, in other words.

That's right. So there were some other weird things that didn't make it, but that were introduced flamingos, which I guess aren't that weird. But a guy introduced sea lions, too, at one point, and they were accused of stealing pigs in the area. But the guy who introduced sea lions and flamingos, he had a legendary restaurant out on an island in the middle of the Salton Sea called Mollett Island, which is actually just sitting atop a dormant volcano.

It's very important to remember this for later. It's a dormant but not extinct volcano. It's just kind of sitting there chilling waiting to go up. That's right. And, you know, once you have flamingos, you're going to have people because people want to go see those flamingos. So by the 1950s, developers had come along and, turned it into what they called the California Riviera or the Salton Riviera or Palm Springs by the sea. And it's exactly what you think.

It's tiki bars, its restaurants had a very Palm Springsy vibe. Like, you know, Elvis performed there, Frank Sinatra performed there. They had, you know, I wasn't kidding about the water skiing. People yachted, people swam. It was just a big recreation area out there in the middle of the desert. And, 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 this beautiful inland sea lake. Yeah, people started building vacation homes there. There were very famous speedboat races that were held there every year. At one point, some developers sunk $2 million in 1960 money into building the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club, which became basically the crown jewel of the Salton Sea area. There were postcards that said greetings from the Salton Sea. There was a Bombay Beach resident who's quoted...

Wait, they had postcards? They had postcards. Did they sell shot glasses? I... Yes. There was a Spencer's gifts on the Salton Sea in the 60s. All right.

You could also get a bitch and Grateful Dead poster and a Latoya Jackson and lingerie poster. Right. Is she in a Lambo? No, that's Garfield. Oh, okay. So there was this Bombay Beach resident, which is one of the little party towns on the Salton Sea.

And it's still there. There's something like 350 people that 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 time bomb just growing underneath their water skis, essentially, day by day. And so finally in around the 70s, it became clear that the Salton Sea's glitz was starting to wear off and there was rotten Big Macs underneath.

Do you know I thought you were going to lead in with when you said the problem is? I thought you're going to say, is it spring break? It's not meant to last forever. Oh, that's a great one. Yeah. 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 suggest it in, too. I agree. 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 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 up being a big part of the problem. Developments 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. I feel like it usually goes south like this in some way. Yeah, it's hubris. Yeah. So, yeah, that runoff would sometimes flood the lake.

There would be so much of it. And those developments would flood, like you were saying. The other problem with the runoff is that it's not just salt, it brings lots of pesticides and fertilizers with it. And remember that there was no outlet for this lake, which made it a lake in the first place. So all of this toxic water didn't have anywhere to go, right? It just stayed in the lake.

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 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. So all this stuff is starting to, like, happen in the Salton Sea, starting in the 70s and 80s. And it's just becoming clear that there's problems that are starting to brew, like literally brewing within the Salton Sea. Yeah, it's called eutrophication. 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, it was really massive. This one is fairly staggering. Just over a five-month period from December 91 to April 92, 150,000 little small waterbirds are called,

what are those, eared grebs? Yeah. Is that what we're pronouncing that? I was going to say grebbies, but I think you nailed it. I'm not really sure, but they're little small water birds and 150,000 them died over five months on the Salton Sea, another 20,000 in 94, 10,000 white and brown pelicans died out in 1996, about 10,000 other fish-eating birds.

And this is the really sad one, even though it was, I say, only 1,000, that's a lot. But they were endangered brown pelicans, and apparently that was the largest sort of single die-off of an endangered species to ever happen. Yeah. Yeah, and all this is going down on the Salton Sea. Or the tilapia, man. How about that stat? Yeah, the most eye-popping stat that I've found is that 8 million, 8 million tilapia died in one single day in August of 1999. How do they figure that, you know?

I don't know. They must have counted one in like a square foot and then multiplied it by Big Macs or something. Yeah, but, well, in this case, fish tacos maybe. Gross. That was probably insensitive. What, fish tacos? Well, I mean, tilapia is good for, I don't eat tilapia much, but it's pretty good for a fish taco. Aren't they the rats of the sea?

Yeah, I think so. I used to eat it more. I'll eat tilapia. I'm not that fancy. Oh. Oh, yeah? Yeah. I'll eat tilapia right in front of you.

Well, I'll be dining on my Chilean sea bass. Nice. Or what was that called? It was something toothfish, right? Didn't they rename it for marketing? I forgot about that. That's the real name for seabas. That's right.

Suckers. So, yes, again, I think it's worth restating. Eight million tilapia died in a single day in 1999. The previous record before that had been set the summer prior, and that was 500,000 that died on a single day. So clearly things are getting worse by the year at the Salton Sea by the time the 90s roll around. 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 going to say bodies. So there's another, there's an explanation for this, too, and it's actually pretty simple. In addition to those, the eutrophication dead zones that are produced by those algae blooms, just simple summertime heat in a really simple. saline body of water can kill fish en masse. And that's exactly what was going on. As the salt and sea warmed as summer started to kind of get going, and there's like 105 degree August temperatures, hot water, warm water, carries less oxygen than cooler water, and salt water carries less oxygen than freshwater. So when you have warm briny water, fish can suffocate, and that's what was happening.

And so fish die-offs are just an annual part of life around the Salton Sea. Yeah, and I mean, not only that, it's just losing surface area. It's shrinking. So 10% has been lost in recent years. They're projecting 40% by 2030. And when that's happening in a really salty area and all those pesticides and metals and everything that have been, you know, deposited over the years due to the agriculture all around, it just makes it more concentrated. And it's just, you know, it's a bad scene. It's getting just saltier over the years.

It's getting more, you know, 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 10 years, basically kind of taking care of anything else that might still be living there. 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 shrunk. And they expect it's going to shrink another 40% by 2030. So things are getting dire here, right? And you can kind of imagine that as things started to go downhill, tourism dropped off. And that happened exactly as you'd think,

that North Shore Beach and Yacht Club that was the Crown Jewel, it closed down in 1984 because there was a flood from agricultural runoff. And then I saw a really cool, eerie picture, Chuck. There's a drive-in movie theater, again, from back in the day. It's in Bombay Beach.

And for some reason, the cars are all parked, like they're there to see the movie, but they're all junked and abandoned, mostly missing wheels. And they're just, they just got put there like that. And it looks like everybody just kind of left the Salton Sea mid-movie. it's really cool to see I would strongly suggest looking up that picture I don't remember where I saw it

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 abandon Rollercoaster parks Amusement parks We'll still go to the Salt and Sea To kind of check things out Right And one of these videos

It's from the gnarly speed shop And I think if you just look up abandoned cars At Drive-in on YouTube Narnly Speed Shop They do a cool video sort of walkthrough Of the drive-in and the surrounding area There's this very like every picture you see of this There's a very kind of striking old orange Maverick A car sitting in the front of 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 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 salt and sea and what happened there. But it's a pretty cool video. And there were boats in the parking lot, too, so I don't think, like, it just looks like everyone got up in the middle of the movie.

I think people just, like, went and, like, parked their cars in this abandoned lot is what happened. Sure, sure. Yeah, I know that they didn't do that. It didn't happen that rapidly, but that's what it looks like. I think it's so cool, you know? I didn't think he thought that. 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? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Learning stuff from Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. Yes, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double board certified physician. And I'm Hurricane Dibolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled,

Do I have scurvy at 3 a.m? On Health Stuff, we're talking about health in a different way. It's not only about what we can do to improve our health. But also what our health says about us and the way we're living. Like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50% of a. Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type 2?

Extremely. Or our in-depth analysis of how incredible mangoes are. Oh, it's hard to explain to the rest of the world that you, like, your mangoes are fine because mangoes are incredible, but like, you don't even know. You don't know. You don't know. It's going to be a fun ride. So tune in.

Listen to Health Stuff on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The one extremely fluid and common factor in emotion when it comes to war and battle is fear for both sides. Do you remember the fear of combat? 100%. This Veterans Day, the Good Stuff podcast, honors those who've served and the stories that remind us what strength really looks like. Had over 50 operations and had 23 blood transfusions. It is extremely difficult to navigate the VA system.

I think what frustrates us the most is thinking about our veterans from World War II era, from Vietnam era, that don't have an advocate on the phone every day, all day calling for them. These are things that need to be talked about. These are things that need to be discussed. We're talking about resilience, purpose, and finding hope through community and connection. There are blessings in there as well that will happen in the most unexpected places. You have to find the humor in it, or I think it'll literally kill you. Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the Iheart radio app.

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is nostalgia. I talked to the chat, GPD. She's like, you really did first lady to have a gayfrey girl's tape in Atlanta Georgia. Like, that's what separates you from a lot of people and I'm like, oh what? You're right. Atlanta doesn't wait for permission. It builds its own spotlight. Um big rule. Let us guide you through

the stories behind Atlanta's most iconic moments. Listen to Atlanta is on the iHeart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Lately I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia

How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet for border. I heard that one before but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua wall. It's stuff.

It's stuff. It's stuff. It's not. Okay, Chuck. So the Salton Sea is really gone downhill. There's no denying it. People have decamped from there, not just vacationers, but people who live there, too. Just moved away because it's gotten so gross.

We didn't mention it, but one of the things that happened, I think, I don't remember what year it was. There was a sulfur dioxide cloud that wafted basically all across Southern California all the way to Los Angeles. And it stunk like rotten eggs, and they traced it back to the Salton Sea. It was all of the decomposition of all the muck, all the dead fish, all the everything. It was so bad that you could smell it all over Southern California. So this is the state that the Salton seasons. People are like, we need to do something about this.

And for years and years, starting in the early, late 90s, early 2000s, the idea was, let's just restore it to its former glory. And that idea became a non-starter essentially for the next couple decades, because that'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. Yeah, we'll talk about a bunch of the stops and starts over the years. In 2003, the water districts of Southern California signed off. There was this deal that they had been negotiating for years called the Quantification Settlement Agreement, the QSA.

And basically what they were trying to get done was say, hey, let's once again take some of that Colorado River water. And the stuff that they had been using for irrigation is now being redirected to, like, you know, a lot of 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. Right. And in exchange, those areas would say, all right, now what we're going to do is pay the farmers there a lot of money to upgrade their old equipment. It was really inefficient irrigation equipment. The newer versions won't have nearly as much waste water. And so they're like, let's do a tradeoff here.

We'll pay you to upgrade your stuff. And in return, you give us a lot of the water that we need. 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 Salton Sea any longer. And part of that quantification settlement agreement was we need to take some of this water that the Imperial Valley farmers used to use to use. and feed it into the Salton Sea for 15 years. Yeah.

They even paid the farmers to leave some of their landfallow so they could direct that water to the Salton Sea. In retrospect, that seems like total madness. Yeah. They were essentially wasting all of that water, but it actually turned out to be pressing, 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. It's sort of like leaving the water on in your tub with, the drain slightly open, and just being like, we're just going to leave the tub water on for 15 years so we can keep this body of water. Yes, but your tub you got from an abandoned house, and it has bath water that's 100 years old and full of pollutants and algae, and you're just running your water into it. Yeah, so it's a horror movie tub. Yes, exactly. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, so you might be asking like, hey, if this thing wasn't supposed to be there to begin with, 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 eventually might happen

but it's still a habitat it's still a migratory stop for birds on that fly route and it's because you know southern California has been developed so much a lot of the other other natural habitats for them have gone away.

So the Salton Sea was, as sad as it was, was like an oasis for them almost. Right. Yeah. That is sad because if the Salton Sea is the more attractive option because that's all that's left, those poor birds are in trouble. Yeah.

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 Salton City, which I believe is the biggest town along the Salton Sea. It's on the northwest shore. their population actually increased since the 2020 census by almost 1,000 people, which are like 1,000 people who cares. Well, they were less than 6,000 in population at the time of the 2020 census. So people are moving there because the housing is so affordable.

It's insane. So there's people there. There's in the whole region, there's something like 650,000 people. And all of those people are at tremendous risk right now of a cornucopia. of health hazards that are starting to develop because the salt and sea evaporates more and more and more because the runoff isn't sustaining it anymore and it's so hot, that exposed seabed or lake bed

that's so chockful 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. Yeah, asthma, they've already found an uptick in asthma. There's a doctor named Jill Johnson, a Ph.D., who's an assistant professor of preventative medicine at Southern Cal, and she's working on a research project called the Salton Sea and Children's Health, colon, assessing Imperial Valley respiratory health and the environment, along with partner Shorae Farzan, another PhD. And they're basically following elementary school children in that area and are seeing how their health is advanced.

And right now, pretty bad asthma rates and they haven't proved causation yet, but it seems like it's probably headed that way. 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. And there's all sorts of other stuff to worry about, too, because there's metals, pesticides, DDT's been found in there. There's just so much crud in there that now that it's drying up is turning into dust and getting carried as particulate matter, that you don't 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. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's just like health issues. There's also like a financial impact. There was a study about 11 years ago or so from the Pacific Institute. They're a think tank in Oakland that deals with water policy. And they said the financial toll could be as much as $70 billion of the next 30 years. Right. Like property values, like you said, going south, public health, which we've mentioned, the continued loss of recreational revenue and natural habits. So, you know, there's a big financial burden. So, you know, obviously because of that, California over the past, like, you know, 25 years has had various stops and starts with funding for different projects that will get approved and then the money just gets diverted or never shows up. Yeah. And especially before that 2014 study from the Pacific Institute, people are like, this $8 billion seems like a little much to restore the salt and see. One of the reasons why is because the area that the Salton Sea is in, the people who live around it are fairly low income.

It's a very rural area. And a lot of the people who are affected live in Mexico. So back in Sacramento, the capital of California, which is pretty far away from the Salton Sea, the political will just hasn't been there. And one of the things you could do, if you were a senator, a congressperson, a governor, you could fully go after. a bunch of funds to save the Salton Sea and remediate the area and get it back to its former glory. And then your legislature would say, no, we're not funding that. And you'd be like, oh, man, I tried. And that seems like what the pattern was for the first, like about 20-ish years, maybe a little more than that,

that people started coming up with ideas to do something about this. Yeah, Gray Davis, when he was governor in 2003, signed the Salton Sea Recre—I'm sorry, Restoration Act. And the Salt and 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 is a lake. Right? Yes, absolutely.

All right. In 2007, the Corps of Engineers, the Army Corps of Engineers, got authorization to spend up to 30 million on projects. The money was finally appropriated in 2015. And the Obama administration spent a couple of hundred grand. is all on a study, another study even. That was the $30 million. That's what it turned out to be from what I can tell. It went from $30 million to $200,000,

and it was for another study. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, I mean, none of this, though, is going to make any difference. I mean, even a $30 million thing, or I think there was one plan, yeah, a 10-year Salton Sea plan to cost $383 million, but that's not even for restoration,

because like you said, that ship has sailed. It is a multi, multi-billion dollar thing if they want to get this thing back to the California Riviera. So it doesn't seem like that's just ever going to happen. It's not even possible. No, so now they're looking at restoring parts of it to turn it back into wetlands for birds. Right. And that 10-year plan, it was estimated to cost $383 million just to do that.

Yeah. And it looked like it was just going to be another pie in the sky proposal that was, would never get funding. But California came up with something like $200 million of that. They're under Gavin Newsom in the last couple of years. There's been huge, crazy movements compared to what had been done in the last couple of decades. And California came up with $200 million. Out of nowhere, mind-bogglingly, the federal government shipped in another $240 million, $245.

So now this project that needed $383 million has almost half a billion. billion. So not only are they now on the Salton Sea saying like, you know, when are we ever going to be able to do anything about this to, we can actually do more than we wanted to do in our 10-year plan, the things are starting to pick up and they're starting to restore wetlands. And it actually looks like it's going to not be quite the ecological disaster that it would have been, had California just sat on its hands. Yeah, I think between 2003 and 2016, Just a few dozen acres of the wetland were restored since then, about 2,000 more. And the species conservation habitat project has a plan over the next decade to restore another 9,000 acres.

So that'd be like roughly 12,000 acres of restoration, which is pretty good. They also think that, you know, it's Southern California. So it's a moneyed area in general, not that exact area, but they're saying like, hey, we can like, we've got this great land there that we can make money off still. Remember that Mullet Island that's on the dormant volcano. That means there's some hotspots there. And so some people are saying, hey, let's put a few billion dollars toward a geothermal electricity plant. Yeah.

Or maybe mine some lithium. Yes, I believe they're already building the plants there. And then the lithium, I don't know if they've actually started that, but there's a lot of lithium there. And that is like 21st century gold 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 to lithium mine there. And of course, they're going to end up lithium mining there because it's just so valuable. But some people are like, it's already an environmental catastrophe. Who cares if lithium mining makes it a little bit worse?

It's better than mining in a more pristine area and really screwing that up. And other people are like, no, we're trying to restore it. So lithium mining is going to not only undo that stuff, it's going to make it even worse than it was. But my money is definitely on them lithium mining. Yeah, agreed. There's a couple other things that are noteworthy about the Salton Sea. I guess we can leave that part that there's actually hope for it right now. But along the way, like you can imagine such a bizarre place generated some really interesting urban legends over the years, right?

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

There are a bunch of Navy planes that did crash. I think 18 flyers died over the years, but there's 24 planes sunken in the Salton Sea right now. And then there's this one really weird legend that predates the Salton Sea. It's the lost ship of the desert. Have you ever heard of that? Never heard of it.

Well, it's apparently this legend or lore 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 Salton Basin, which is now underneath the Salton Sea. So there's this whole idea that there's a Viking ship potentially under there too.

Wow. Yeah. There's a great dive bar. The ski in, right? Yeah, that's in that video. They go to ski in and play creepy old piano. and have some beer. Yeah, they call it the lowest dive bar

in the Western Hemisphere because it's like 237 feet below sea level, I think. Yeah, right there at, I don't know if they still call it Bombay Beach or if they took that name away, but Bombay non-beach, because a beach without water is not a beach. Right.

Also, it's attracted a lot of artists, too. Like Slab City is essentially taken over military installation. There's a folk art installation called Salvation Mountain. There's another whole, like, outdoor gallery called East Jesus, I believe is what it's called. So there's a lot of art that's being made there.

It's kind of turning it into a really neat, weird, decrepit art place. Cool. Yeah. You got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay. Well, that's it for the Salt and See, everybody.

We'll have to keep an eye on it and see what happens. And in the meantime, I think it's time. for listener mail. Well, speaking of art, before I read listener mail, I want to give a plug to dear old Ben, our comrade here at Stuff You Should Know, our colleague, he is a producer along with Jerry, and Ben is a musician, Ben Hackett, and he put out a great piece of art. He put out a record called Songs for Sleeping Dogs, not too long ago, and Ben's awesome, Songs for Sleeping Dogs is great.

It's very viby, instrumental. I think you dig it, actually. And so, yeah, go check it out. Yeah. Wherever you get music, basically. Yes, Ben is probably our most beloved stuff you should know, remember, because he's just so cool and chill and nice. Whoa.

Yeah. You say that in front of Jerry? Mm-hmm. Okay. All right, listener mail time. We've got a couple of the next couple of episodes on MTV and VH-12. 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 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 didn't quite understand so like it was just its music channels I didn't know that it had any music channels left. 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 now. Well, they definitely did something, and it was right after our episode for sure. Yeah. All right, so this is about MTV. Hey, guys, hoping that you would touch on this, especially toward the end when Josh is talking about the social impacts of MTV. But I'm talking about the MTV cut.

Before MTV, the average shot in a film or television show lasted an average of eight seconds. and the MTV cut whittled that down to two seconds. In college, circa 2000, it was called the MTV Cut. Now, the MTV Cut is the norm. You'd be hard-pressed to find a show that stays on one shot for eight seconds

consistently anymore. I wonder if people changed, or if the MTV Cut changed people and the way we watch. I'll bet that's one of those things where if you saw it now, you'd be like, wow, this is really weird and not quite put your finger on why,

but it'd just be almost unsettling to see an eight-second cut. Maybe. I mean, I remember people talking about quick cut because of music videos. Like, it was a thing. That is from Chris Singleton, who is an ops manager for Independence Rock Media. Very nice. So Chris knows what they're talking about. I think so.

Well, thanks a lot, Chris. That was very interesting. And we want to hear from you, too. If you've got anything interesting to say, you can email. From you too? Yeah. You can, yes, we want to hear from Bono. and The Edge and the other guys.

Oh, boy. What? Adam and Larry, come on. There you go. Thank you. I could have come up with those, given a couple of months for sure. Sure.

So, yeah, if you want to be like the band, you too, you can email us at StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. 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. On the podcast Health Stuff, we are tackling all the health questions that keep you up at night. I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally, a double-board certified physician.

And I'm Hurricane Dabolu, a comedian and someone who once Googled, Do I Have Scurvy at 3 a.m? And on our show, we're talking about health in a different way, like our episode where we look at diabetes. In the United States, I mean, 50, percent of Americans are pre-diabetic. How preventable is type two? Extremely.

Listen to health stuff on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know the shade is always Shadiest right here. Season 6 of the podcast Reasonably Shady with Jazele Bryan and Robin Dixon is here dropping every Monday. As two of the founding members of the Real Housewives Potomac were giving you all the laughs, drama, and reality news you can handle. And you know we don't hold back.

So come be reasonable or shady with us each and every Monday. Listen to reasonably shady from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Thanksgiving isn't just about food. It's a day for us to show up for one another. It's okay not to be okay sometimes and be able to build strength and love within each other. I'm Elia Connie, host of the podcast Family Therapy, a series where real families come together to heal and find hope. I've always wanted us to have therapy, so this is such a beautiful opportunity.

Listen to Season 2 of Family Therapy every Wednesday on the Black Effect Podcast Network, IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.