Decaying Salton Sea

One of California's most toxic landmarks could kill two regions' economies

Officials are scrambling to restore the decaying Salton Sea

By Ariana Bindman

For decades, the Salton Sea has mystified public imagination. 

Positioned in a rural desert region just miles from popular travel destinations like Palm Springs, it’s California’s largest inland lake — and one of its biggest ecological disasters. 

Millions of dollars of federal government funding, however, may help prevent the disaster from getting even worse.

Both a sump for agricultural runoff and refuge for endangered wildlife, the terminal sea — which has no outflow — is linked to Imperial Valley’s ongoing air quality issues, which have been called some of the worst in the nation. Many children throughout the region’s border towns already have from asthma, studies show, and scientists believe it’s linked to the sea’s receding shoreline, or playa, which emits toxic dust particles containing arsenic, selenium and pesticides from nearby agriculture.

Because the sea is a dumping ground for runoff, it’s also prone to eutrophication, a process that leads to so much plant overgrowth, it consumes the oxygen in the water, choking wildlife. But it’s also home to a rare and endangered fish — the desert pupfish, which is the only fish indigenous to the hypersaline lake. The mighty, 2-inch creature can survive extreme environments that are almost twice as salty as the ocean, along with water temperatures that reach as high as 108 degrees or as low as 40. 

But it’s been common knowledge for years now that its unique habitat is shrinking.  

The Salton Sea Authority, which includes Imperial Irrigation District officials and council members for the tribe of Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians, warns that if nothing is done, “the roughly 220 square miles of exposed playa will cause an air quality disaster of such enormous proportions that the valleys of Coachella and Imperial as well as southerly into Mexico may become uninhabitable.” 

“The agriculture of the Coachella and Imperial Valleys will be ruined and the economy of the Coachella and Imperial valleys will become non-existent,” officials wrote.   

Amid dire warnings, the Biden-Harris administration gave California $70 million in federal funds to restore wildlife habitat by the sea before it spirals out of control, a Dec. 8 press release from the governor’s office announced. 

But researchers are skeptical that it’s the right solution.   

‘Potential outcomes of these efforts are highly uncertain’

This recent funding is part of a “landmark agreement” to spend $250 million on Salton Sea restoration efforts, according to a California Natural Resources Agency news release. The funding is slated to go toward conserving 400,000 acre-feet annually for the next four years, the release said, even though it’s unclear whether it will actually help restore the lake. 

Previous reports from the UC Riverside accuse state agencies of lacking the scientific knowledge needed to successfully save the sea from collapse — and wrote that “mismanagement and competition” between federal, state and local agencies already led to critical delays. 

“The Salton Sea Management Program, led by a consortium of state agencies, aims to achieve its desired outcomes by constructing 30,000 acres of bird habitat and dust suppression projects by 2028. Progress has been slow, however, with only 755 acres completed by the end of 2020,” a 2021 report from UCR’s Salton Sea Task Force said.

“Potential outcomes of these efforts are highly uncertain,” it continued, and “the degree to which restoration efforts will produce viable bird habitats is similarly uncertain.”

“Birdwatchers care about habitat restoration, right? But what about people who live near the lake and their kids have asthma? They may have a slightly different prior set of priorities,” David Lo, a professor of biomedical sciences at the UCR School of Medicine, told SFGATE.

Lo, who contributed to the report, told SFGATE that officials haven’t been paying attention to the Salton Sea crisis — if they were, he said, they wouldn’t have diverted water from the Colorado River to San Diego, the main water source that keeps Salton Sea flows steady. 

“The main communities that are affected are immigrant Mexican agriculture workers living under relatively poor conditions,” Lo told SFGATE. “As the dust gets worse, and it spreads to places where rich white people live, like Palm Springs, maybe there will be more attention to the question.” 

In a 2022 article, the university wrote that terminal lakes are shrinking all over the world due to global warming and water diversion — the Colorado River Basin drought has been affecting lakes across the southwest.   

In response, California, Nevada and Arizona scrambled to conserve water, successfully averting an ecological crisis — and the recent federal funding for the Salton Sea is yet another move that aims to prevent another disaster from unfolding. 

For now, officials are hopeful that it will help restore one of the state’s most haunting landmarks, protecting the sea’s unusual wildlife and nearby communities in the Imperial Valley.

“This major investment continues momentum for the critical work underway to stabilize and restore the Salton Sea for the benefit of Imperial and Coachella Valley communities and wildlife that rely on the Sea,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Dec. 8 press release. “Working closely with our federal, tribal, state and local partners, California will continue to make progress on our ecological, health and economic goals in this key region.” 

But scientists on the ground say that the future of the lake remains a looming question mark.

“I think the question is going to be: Are people going to talk to each other and do the research and come to some kind of consensus of like, what needs to be done?” Lo said. “There are proposed answers all over the map.”

“People need to talk to each other,” he added.