(David) In the 1950s, the Salton Sea promised to be Southern California's new playground.

Since then, it's contributing waters have dried up and pollutants have increased.

It is widely viewed as dead.

But pockets of life and human occupation remain, that add to some of the sea's unusual natural features.

Some of them are decidedly strange.

(Announcer) Funding for In The Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

Additional funding for In The Americas with David Yetman was provided by Laura and Arch Brown and by the Guilford Fund.

(David) The Salton Sea has the largest surface area of any body of water in California.

It fills a depression created by the continuing separation of Baja, California and Southern California from the mainland of North America.

A millennium ago, it was a huge freshwater lake.

Now it is heavy with salt and contaminants, the result of both natural and human-produced flooding and pollutants from the Colorado River.

It lies more than 200 feet below sea level.

I'm sitting on a bridge over the All-American Canal that connects the Colorado River and takes water from there and dumps it into the Imperial Valley and ultimately the Salton Sea.

(James) The Salton Sea was created pretty much by accident.

(David) No one is better acquainted with the Salton Sea than my friend, ecologist Jim Cornett.

(James) In 1905-1906, an ill conceived irrigation project allowed the entire Colorado River to flow into the Salton Trough, which at that time was dry, creating the sea that we see today.

It would have evaporated all away after they finally closed the breach, but at that same time, there was a lot of agricultural development that was bringing in Colorado River water for irrigation, and they used that irrigation water to constantly flush salts from the soil and all that runoff, irrigation water ended up going into the basin and maintained the level of the sea up until the present time.

Movement of agricultural water into the sea is increasing salinity and also increasing amounts of pesticide and fertilizer residues, which has made the Salton Sea increasing toxic to marine life.

If you were to circumnavigate the Salton Sea today, you would see this gigantic body of inland water surrounded on the southern end by agricultural fields and a little bit on the northern end as well.

Some small towns, most of which have diminished in size as the recreation resource of the Salton Sea decline.

There'd be some great vistas and you're going to see mountain ranges that have been thrust up because of movements along the San Andreas Fault, which cuts right through the eastern boundary of the Salton Sea and created the Salton Trough.

(David) We meet the Salton Sea at its southeastern end.

Geothermal plants abound here, taking advantage of that tumultuous geological activity far below the Earth's surface.

Early explorers were alerted to the geothermal potential by humble burpings and rumblings of mud pots.

(James) One of the really interesting things about the Salton Sea area is because the fault is essentially a crack in the Earth's crust there█s a lot of hot earth.

If we go down just a few hundred feet in this area and that warm earth because of a magma chamber that's below can heat any groundwater that seeps down into it.

And there's a lot of seepage at the Salton Sea.

Even today.

(David) Do you think the people that were looking for geothermal sources saw these mud pots and that gave them the idea, or did they put that in and saw ooh there█s mud ponds up there?

(James) No, I think the mud pots told them that this was a potential geothermal resource area.

(David) It is, it is bizarre.

(James) Yeah.

It's pretty rare in the southwest to see something like this.

(David) One of the things that I find challenging to imagine is there's thousands of feet of sediment below here.

And there's been a, as you said, a lake bed here for hundreds of thousands, probably a couple of million years.

(James) Yeah.

(David) And those sediments have collected and yet somehow there's enough heat for that water to be heated in a column that breaks through in just this tiny little area.

(James) Well, you think it faults as being major cracks in the Earth's crust.

But all faults are associated with a lot of smaller splinter faults.

(David) And that's what this is.

Yes.

Here you're going east and west rather than following north and south.

(James) And its allowing some of the material that reach the surface along that that small fault.

So when earthquakes occur in an area like this, they can move the ground, and move the material around a little bit, changing the location of where the mud comes up to the surface and explodes and minor ways in little mud pots.

It's changing.

It's about a hundred yards to the east, as compared with 20 years ago when they were closer to the road.

And they've changed and there seems to be more mud being produced at the present time because these towers are lot taller than they were in years past.

(David) Each of these little openings that are here now, they change all the time, has its own sound.

This is kind of like a little glip glip glip and it's enough to keep a little current of of mud running down.

But it will shortly, probably tonight, some time close and another one will open.

Then there's one right here, that makes kind of like a gloop gloop sound Right next door is the one that makes a burgle burgle sound.

Oh, is it a burgle burgle burgle it has three different bubbles coming up and is putting out a lot of hydrogen sulfide.

The consistency of a nice chocolate pudding, but probably not as tasty.

And then there's a fourth one over here.

Well, there's just a biggle biggle.

Then the last one right here, the five or six different blegs going on and very powerful hydrogen sulfide.

So you can get a cacophony of symphonic sounds at the mud pots any time you want to.

From the mud pots, we traveled clockwise around the lake, a journey of more than 70 miles.

We drive first along the western side of the sea, where we find advancing sand dunes.

Jim, you told me we can drive down here to the edge of the dunes.

And you misled me.

(James) Yes, I did.

I haven't been here in a while, and I can't help but notice that the Barchan dunes have now enveloped the paved roadway that once was here.

(David) They're on the march.

(James) Yes, They're moving.

Eventually, each dune will be blown into the Salton Sea where it will die.

(David) Maybe then there's enough.

There's enough source of sand to keep that one up there moving this way.

´Cause that's where the wind's coming from, right?

(James) Right.

And then there's another new one forming in front of that one.

(David) So the march will continue for the indefinite future.

And perhaps as things get hotter and drier, there will be less vegetation to hold the sand in and we█ll get more.

(James) Barchan dune is really just a crescent dune.

It's shaped like the letter C back of the C faces the wind and the open part of the C faces downwind.

These are marching dunes they█re very active and they continue to move in that shape across the desert landscape.

And this is one of the best examples I know of Barchan dunes.

And what makes it particularly interesting is that they are eventually blown into the Salton Sea, where they drowned for each one that dies in the Salton Sea, there's another one created a little bit to the west.

(David) As long as you have the source of sand and the wind and not a lot of moisture, the march will continue then.

(James) The dune fields is expanding now because of increasing severity of drought in this area and additional heat.

(David) Everywhere we see the remnants of failed subdivisions and commerce all derived from a boom in the 1950s and 1960s when the Salton Sea became the best known aquatic playground in southern California.

In 1960 there were more visitors to the Salton Sea than to Yosemite National Park.

The place was full of hotels and restaurants and mobile home parks.

There were marinas all over the place.

The sea was full of boats, fishing boats and pleasure boats and speedboats.

The lake fell on hard times as the story unfolds.

But this harks back to the way things were in happier times on the Salton Sea.

In the 1930s, probably to the 1980s.

It was similar in its pleasures to Las Vegas, except without the casinos.

We are in almost in downtown Salton City.

It was conceived as a massive urban development and all the streets have names, but most of them have nobody living on them.

Where there are still people living, it looks as though they don't really spend the hot time of year here.

This is one of the hottest, if not the hottest place in the United States.

These massive bales are alfalfa, the Imperial Valley, a good deal of the more than 500,000 acres of irrigated land, probably close to half is dedicated to raising alfalfa, bermuda grass and Sudan grass, all of them for cattle feeding.

And that's where a great deal of the Colorado River water goes to from the air, the various colors of green show different crops.

But where you see the yellow and the brown indicates these are lying fallow.

The climate here is so warm it almost never freezes.

This undeveloped city that never really happened.

It has all street names you can imagine.

They had to go through a lot of hoops to come up with names for these hundreds of streets.

And there are literally hundreds of them.

We█re gonna turn here and let's see what this one is called.

If anyone wants to know where we are at the corner of Seashore and Sea kist in more or less downtown Salton City.

It█s hard to believe but this building was only was within 100 yards of the edge of the beach at this side of the Salton Sea that came up this far.

The northern end of the sea is included in the Torres Martinez Indian reservation of the Cahuilla people who have lived in the vicinity of the Salton Sea for hundreds of years, from the time when the Salton Sink was nearly filled with fresh water and brimming with life.

(James) If you were along the sea decades ago, say, in 1962, you would have seen far more bird life than you see today.

You would have seen people fishing along the shoreline for Corvina and some other game fish that lived here.

It was quite a different place back then and there was a great land rush around the margins of the Salton Sea to build homes and hotels and campgrounds.

It's really just a skeleton of what it used to be.

Ecologically speaking.

The predictions are that within the next 20 to 30 years, all life in the sea will have vanished.

The increasing salinity of the sea and the loss of the game fish that were artificially introduced in the 1950s is the vanishing of a lot of fish eating birds that used to be so incredibly abundant around the Salton Sea during the wintertime in particular.

The government agencies that are involved and responsible for protecting the sea is they're trying to save very small portions of the sea so that there still will be some resources for the birds that fly over this area every winter.

(David) I'm here about sea level in the most desert like place in the United States.

And what do I find?

Date palms.

(James) Dates are an important agricultural product of course primarily in North Africa and the Middle East.

But they found that the climate here is conducive and they introduce date palms around the turn of the last century into this area, and they thrive.

They tend to produce the dates after they get beyond the reach of most animals, which is roughly four meters or 12 feet above ground level.

This is a relatively new grove in this area, and it just shows you the staying power of dates and the palate of people all over the world.

(David) The west side of the Salton Sea is about 300 feet below where I am standing now.

About 600 years ago, I would have been standing at the shoreline of Lake Cahuilla, which at the time was eight times as large as the Salton Sea ever got.

How do we know that if we look along the mountains right above the sea, we see a very sharp line that was a shoreline.

And all over you find freshwater clams and snails that do not live in the Salton Sea but lived here at the time.

It was an enormous lake.

Thousands and thousands of years earlier, perhaps three to four hundred thousand years ago, the lake was even larger and would have been the largest lake in all of what is now the United States.

(James) This used to be the edge of where the water was, the shoreline of the Salton Sea.

And so what was built here were marinas, accessory buildings that supplied the marina with all the things that boats and tourists would require.

And you can see that the waters now well over a hundred feet away from where we're standing, not the best place to have a marina for boats because we're in one of the hottest, driest places in North America, evaporation rates are huge!

(David) They were astronomical.

(James) Unbelievable.

And so the Salton Sea is slowly evaporating away now.

If you look right over here, you can pick up what we're walking on.

And most of these are barnacles.

It's covered with this because this was an area that had a pretty robust marine ecosystem for a while of barnacles and even some clams, snails.

So as we wander the shorelines of the South Sea, we find all kinds of shells, some shells from the recent Salton Sea, some invertebrates from the Colorado River.

And then if we go way back in time, 500,000 years ago, and before we find some shell fragments such as this oyster shell, from a time when the Gulf of California extended all the way to Palm Springs, including all of what is today, the Salton Sea.

In the summertime, there's a lot of organic matter in the water and a lot of microorganisms and small invertebrates are dying and you end up getting hydrogen sulfide odor.

It does appear in the paper once in a while, and it's one of the excuses or justifications for solving the Salton Sea problem because of the odor.

There is a very high incidence of respiratory ailments and allergies for people living along the southern shoreline of the Salton Sea.

And in the last few years that's been blamed on the shrinking sea and the exposure of the shoreline to winds.

And then the wind picking up materials along the shoreline.

But in fact, respiratory illnesses have been at a very high rate in the Imperial Valley long before the Salton Sea started shrinking.

And that's because they're constantly plowing up agricultural lands, putting a lot of dust in the air.

And in that dust are a lot of pesticides and fertilizer residues, which has impacted the health of people living in the Imperial Valley.

The trend is towards that receding further and further with the passage of time and of course, water.

And this area, everybody wants the water from the Colorado River.

The amount of water available even for farmland is decreasing.

And now they're diverting some of that irrigation water to the city of San Diego.

So the long term outlook for the Salton Sea is bleak in the extreme.

(David) This part of Southern California is going to be an island anyway.

As the whole rift continues and pulls away, California will break away with the San Andreas Fault doing it right now.

Yeah.

And so it will become an island and we won't have to worry about this.

But you won't be here.

(James) No, probably not.

If I am here, I'll be very excited.

I'll be immortal.

This is one of the few places you can see evidence of the San Andreas Fault.

Most of it's buried under the Salton Sea.

But right here would be what are called the Bat cave buttes.

Clear evidence of some vertical uplift along the San Andreas Fault.

(David) Yeah, we think that the fault is going like this, scraping and tearing as it moves, but in some places is going like this.

(James) Yeah, it it it can get a little hiccup in those hiccups are mountain ranges and this is about as small a hiccup as you can get.

But it's.

(David) That's a baby hiccup.

(James) On top of them are horizontal striations that really reflect vertical tilting of the sandstone.

So it's going from being flat to being vertical and those grooves on top indicate that it has been.

Moved upward instead of being flat.

(David) As we reach the eastern side of the lake, we see the same fragments of previous boom times.

One place continues to thrive in its own peculiar way.

It's called Bombay Beach.

It's not for everyone.

This is the town?

Settlement?

Hamlet?

Called Bombay Beach.

On the Southeastern side of the Salton Sea.

I had heard that it was unusual, but so far I've not been prepared for the unusual things that I've seen.

You see a few boats.

Many of them are not in as good shape as they were when they were new.

The population?

Rumors are between a thousand and two thousand.

(Man) When I first drove in, the first thing I noticed is how beautiful the body of water was.

It's surrounded by mountains.

You have the Chaco mountains over here and then you're flanked by a train that comes in on the side.

And I've traveled the world and there's nowhere quite like this geographically.

There's a lot of Airbnbs in town.

There is a technological college here that has a camp.

There's a little of everything here, and there's a kind of lawlessness and freedom.

(Debra) There's just such an extreme contrast of everything here.

For instance, the beauty, the nature, and then this apocalyptic abandoned village, which it's not actually abandoned.

There's a lot of really interesting people that have come here for a sense of freedom and discovery and kind of what where do we go from here?

The town has had every disaster imaginable, from floods to fires to overpopulation of tilapia to, you know, it's over salted.

We're under sea level.

But at the same time, there's all these alternative people that have come to create something free and new.

(Shorty) They do a lot of apocalyptic movies out here.

That's why they come out.

And then now that we have a big art exhibit, we have a lot of tourists come through just to see what the artists have done.

(David) What do you call the sculptor here?

(Woman) Davinci Fish.

(Shorty) The town█s kind of picking up.

And the older folks in town don't really like it cause, you know, they're used to that--mellow and they can't handle it.

But I enjoy it.

(Ella) Is kind of a retirement community and they're all enjoying their retirement.

(James) This is probably the most unique community around the Salton Sea.

If I had to say.

Most of the other communities fall a little bit more into the quote, normal category.

(David) Mainstream (James) Yeah, more mainstream.

(David) At the very southeastern end, the vast fields of the Imperial Valley, formerly known as the Colorado desert, reach nearly to the shore.

The polluted runoff from these fields is one reason why the lake has become a toxic wasteland.

The future of the Salton Sea is grim given climate change, the drying out of the west and the rapid increase in population and water users in the southwestern United States.

But the sea itself will long be an object of fascination because the deep forces that shaped it will continue to be the forces that shape the geological future of the entire Western United States and the world.

Join us next time In the Americas with me, David Yetmen.

Scientists tell us that in the last two centuries, Earth's population of whales has fallen by 80%.

Gray whales were one of the most endangered cetaceans.

Until stern conservation measures offered them protection.

Now they can reliably make their annual migration from the Gulf of Alaska to the coast of Baja, California.

In a few select places, they exhibit a most remarkable behavior.

You know, this water is not inviting to me at all.

It is the brown color of industrial offal.

When did you first see it?

(James) I first visited the Salton Sea in 1958 and I came on a camping trip with my family and my dad thought it would be a great experience.

And even in 1958, the water was unpleasantly salty.

And none of us kids, my brother or sister wanted to go in the water.

(Announcer) Funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Robert and Carol Dorsey.

Additional funding for In the Americas with David Yetman was provided by Laura and Arch Brown and by the Guilford Fund.