No wonder the lake is drying up with so much irrigation for agriculture, and an absurd number of golf courses in a very small area.
https://www.google.ca/maps/@33.6867973,-116.2608676,25994m
It's clear to me as an outsider that California has serious water sustainability problems. I mean, how long can this last?
I'm not sure the Salton is the best example of that. It's not a permanent fixture. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea
It seems it's presently only still here because of previous inefficient irrigation (from the Colorado River) and that farmers restricting their water usage is actually leading to the Salton's decline.
Not just inefficient, it was a large scale industrial accident. A canal wall was breached and not repaired for two years and the runoff all collected in this low lying area. It’s a very odd place to visit now though for marketing reasons they tried to make it into a resort destination before it became a place you can only tolerate for a very short time.
Ah, interesting. Much more complicated than I'd think, especially as somebody not from those parts.
https://xkcd.com/1739/ - but with "terraforming"
I was visiting Palm Springs one year, late summer. I had assumed that since it was in the middle of the desert, that water use would be regulated.
But as I drove around over there, I was shocked to see massive lawns being watered in the middle of the day, and large amounts of water just flowing out from these lawns into the drains. Sometimes the giant sprinklers were watering the sidewalks and roads too.
What a waste of water! Speaking to a local, they claimed that due to some old water rights agreement, Palm Springs gets its water for really cheap and there is no incentive to conserve it. Sad state of affairs.
The whole system is a mess. As wasteful as it can be, all residential use is only a small fraction of water consumption in this region. An order of magnitude more is used to grow water intensive crops in the SW deserts, and those farmers are only paying on average 1/10th the price per gallon for that same water as people pay for their home use. In many cases the farmers are incentivized to not be more water efficient, because the old water rights can be use it or lose it. They are essentially being paid to waste obscene amounts of water.
Municipal use and waste get the most attention because they are by far the most visible use, but most policies there are just tinkering around the edges and hardly move the overall numbers.
Not Palm Springs but close enough, reporting in for the curious. I've been wastelanding for a few years now in an unincorporated rural township, lucky to be close to allegedly sweet aquifers, but the utility is definitely mismanaged to the extent that it's pretty doubtful if anyone really knows how much water there is. Gold-mining interests are not far away (hello arsenic?), lithium interests are probably looking for an angle. I'm no geologist but maybe an endorheic basin that collects the sweet stuff is good for that too. Anyone think any of this water is being tested with a dismantled EPA?
Anyway a water bill is about $40/month up to 8000 gallons, $3 extra per 1000g overage. About half of the base rate is claimed as "upgrade surcharge". Since it's practically unlimited for free, does that sound right to anyone? The neighbors seem to be feral ghouls about 200 years old, they definitely don't care much about any poisons or the town drying up and blowing away, so they are always YOLOing a honking great deluge of whatever juice is still left into all different kinds of stupid inappropriate leafy greens but fuck it, you know? The pentagon is looking to restart nuclear testing in the backyard anyway so those of who still aren't irradiated yet can look forward to that!
The Salton Sea is drying up due to _decreased_ agricultural water consumption in the area; it was formed by agricultural run-off, which is why it's so toxic, and now there's less runoff to fill it up.
> it was formed by agricultural run-off,
No, its lifespan was extended by agricultural runoff offsetting the natural drying out which would have otherwise occurred after the event which formed it was corrected, but it was formed by a breach in an irrigation canal that occurred in 1905 and wasn't repaired until 1907.
Whoops... it was formed by agricultural run-in!
Regardless, it's sort of a bad example of "humans are the virus" type thinking, since it both lived and died by agriculture.
If you really dig into the story there is an interesting commentary about the horrible Western US water rights compacts system and the continuing inability for US states, especially in the West, to accurately price water consumption in a way that makes consumers sensitive to inefficient water use. But even then, in the case of the Salton Sea, the system actually did work: inefficient agricultural use was "improved" when San Diego called for more water and farmers were forced to be more efficient. Perhaps in an ideal world those farms would never have existed at all.
> it's sort of a bad example of "humans are the virus" type thinking, since it both lived and died by agriculture.
from "Islands of Abandonment":
> As I get further out, my feet sink deeper into the thin, grey sand. When I look closer, I see it is not sand at all, but the dry bones of fish, pounded into shards, and the tiny, skull-like husks of barnacles. This is a foul place. The air is thick with brine and guano and decomposition. Even now, in the violet dusk, the heat is oppressive. But as I cross the crystallised flats, the water gleams into view, an impossible sea in the middle of the desert.
> It is a poison lake whispering sweet nothings. It promises cool succour, quenched thirst. Despite what I know of this shimmering mirage - despite the stink and the rot and the waste that surrounds it, despite the staring eyes of the dead and desiccating fish that litter its shrinking shores, despite the absence of vegetation - I can’t help but quicken my pace. I stumble through sucking mud towards this false vision, on and on until the muck is over my feet, and up to my ankles, and I am shin-deep in a warm broth that, when stirred, releases a draught so stagnant I can taste it.
surely not a place to be proud of.
Seems like an excellent example of "humans are the virus" to me. Human error created an entire lake and then human inefficiency sustained it (for a while). Now the end product of all of that human activity is poisoning the air around it.
The Salton Sea is artificial and not used for irrigation. It's actually a sink for a lot of agricultural runoff (which is part of the problem)