Toxic Salton Sea dust triggers changes in lung microbiome after just one week
phys.org
phys.org
Salton sea features heavily, and you’ll learn the whole American West is on as fragile a water setup with similar health, civil and economic problems to follow as what this Salton sea example, but imagine it applying LA-wide, central Oregon-wide, Salt Lake valley-wide.
Water issues out west will be a major issue of USA’s next 70 years. Very scary stuff.
Although it’s not a natural sea and its full of chemicals from agricultural run off the residents that live in the area are suffering from the dust and fears of great dust clouds plumbing and going west to San Diego were also insensitives from keeping the hazardous Salton Sea from drying up.
Beautiful place to visit…just not during summer when it smells from all the Dead Sea life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8TjGAWxL23c
I watched this 20 years ago. It's a really interesting and funny documentary about the Salton Sea and the area around it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagues_%26_Pleasures_on_the_S...
The air is clearly toxic, you smell it the second you get there. To live there means living in olfactory mental ignorance in exchange for affordable housing and community.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/10/us/utah-great-salt-lake-dust-...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://xkcd.com/1739/ - but with "terraforming"
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.
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.
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!
Travelling to Joshua Tree later, which isn't right next door, but I'm not sure about wind patterns and stuff.
How scalable the techniques are is one matter but I think the results speak for themselves in proving what's possible with careful (read: high labor input) management.
The way that desertification spreads is primarily because the soil has no capacity for holding water. The most common cause of death in deserts is not actually thirst but drowning. The inability to hold moisture means thatwhen there is rain it can turn into flash floods which will then wash away any top soil there already is.
There are countless techniques used by this group to target that specific problem and build soil safely that won't get washed away. As well as storing water in ways that won't lead to evaporation. They build swales and shape the landscape in order to manage how and where the water flows through the land and use windbreaks to resist the harsh winds that may also lead to topsoil loss.
According to the project, that area of Jordan gets 100mm per year of rain. The Salton sea gets under 75mm per year, so less than 3/4 of that. It appears that this part of Jordan is also significantly cooler and more humid, and has bodies of water within 100km. It also doesn't have a 3.5km high mountain range blocking clouds from passing over.
Unfortunately, the Salton sea has no water sources around it. There's no rivers, there's no Dead Sea. It seems like greening works best is places where there's enough water that tree roots can reach water. In Coachella Valley, the water is 300m deep, so no roots can reach it.
And, according to the desert greening project, greening increases rainfall by creating conditions more favorable for precipitation. The natural summertime relative humidity in the desert surrounding the Salton sea is as low as 4%, with 42C average temperatures. What are the practical limits when the water table is 300m below?
The valley only maintains current greenery by pumping huge amounts of water and constant watering, to the point where there's fogs in the morning caused by the pre-dawn watering. If greening could work in such extreme circumstances, wouldn't it be getting reversed already by this watering regime? Instead any small plot of land that isn't maintained is full of dead plants, even if they're drought tolerant species. Only a few kinds of desert plant native to the area seem to thrive.
Which itself is a joke about accountability if you think about it.
https://www.haaretz.com/0000017f-ea1a-dea7-adff-fbfb7cbf0000
I really wish this would be included in the headline in such stories.
Is there a repository somewhere that measures the number of studies on mice that go on to successful human trials or verification.
With the prominence of studies on mice, I think most humans trials Started on mice.
they did