A Sea Worth Its Salt | Hacker News Reader

A Sea Worth Its Salt

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73 pointssndean13 comments

What about saving the Colorado River instead?

There were magnificent places on it that were totally destroyed. As water desalination and solar energy gets cheaper it would be great idea to give the Colorado back its water.

The Salton Sea is fascinating. Its bed is as low as Badwater Basin in Death Valley, and were it not inundated, it might be the hottest place in the US. A little while ago I submitted a fellow's account of hiking its perimeter during summer: http://dineshdesai.info/saltonwalk/

I grew up in La Quinta, just a bit west of the Salton Sea. Thermal, which is a city between La Quinta and the sea, is tied with Death Valley and the Libyan Sahara for the highest recorded temperature of all time (or at least was, while I was growing up). In the Coachella Valley, every summer includes about a month of 120+ highs, and anyone who has spent more than 3 summers there has seen 130+ temperatures before. It's just damn hot.

Fascinating. The Salton sea could actually provide a lot of productivity, due to its very low dept, it could be possible to create vast arrays of shaded crop covers on top like they are doing across Indian rivers with Solar Panels.

Water could be allowed to drain naturally from either the ocean or other rivers, no need of manual pumps.

You could also build homes on top that due to the surrounding crops and sea underneath be really cool when it comes to temperature.

Also you have have cool walk-able or (boatable !) paths like in Venice.

A modern day paradise in the middle of the desert.

So much potential

I think the biggest issue is that it _is_ in the middle of the desert. You're fighting the stable state by trying to make something nice and walkable.

Maybe it would actually be better to "migrate" the Sea over to a cooler area of the state. We made a lake before, why not do it again?

Seriously though stopping evaporation would be a big win to stop the sea from disappearing.

The only way you're going to stop the evaporation in that climate is by moving the lake underground.

Another comment mentioned fixing the Colorado River - how about expanding that to include restoration of the entire natural river system throughout the Western US? In my mind, that's close to the economic scale of what would be required to keep this artificial sea in the desert from becoming a toxic brine pit.

For context -- total domestic production of salt in 2015 was 48M tons; there's ~128M tons of salt in a cubic mile of seawater; and about 1.8 cubic miles of water in the Salton.

I grew up in La Quinta, right outside of the Salton Sea. It's also the middle of the desert. It's also one of the nicest places on the planet during the 9 months that it isn't averaging 110+ highs.

> A modern day paradise in the middle of the desert.

The Coachella Valley in general has essentially become this.

As someone who grew up outside the Salton Sea (La Quinta), this is always interesting. Every time the real estate speculation market picks up out in the Coachella Valley, you'll hear people making noises about buying up land out there.

Also - it wasn't mentioned in the article, but is pretty important to anyone around there: it smells like rotten eggs. Really strongly. Some mornings in the Coachella Valley the wind will blow in from that direction and the whole place will stink until midday

It's an interesting sight, seeing remnants of tourism and an ecosystem that has been decaying for decades. Route 86 by the Salton Sea is the only place I've ever set cruise control to triple digits (mph) and still been passed by multiple other cars.

A news report [1] says that it appears the Salton Sea has recently passed the tipping point and has become too salty for most biology. Tilapia have stopped breeding in the Salton Sea. Birds which rely on small fish are now absent. Birds which consume small worms from the seafloor are now dying off.

[1] http://www.desertsun.com/story/news/environment/2016/08/09/s...

This was always the end point and at least one of the environmental papers that looked at "saving" it stated as much. Its really too bad that harvesting the salt out of the water isn't economically feasible.

Great podcast btw, love 99pi!

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