Michael V said:

Spiny Norman said:

In 1905, an engineer cut a hole in the Colorado River to save a bankrupt company.

He had no permission. No real plan.

It was later called “a blunder so serious as to be practically criminal.”

Then floodwaters blew the cut wide open.

For two years, the entire Colorado River poured into the California desert.

It took 18 months to stop it.

By then, California had an accidental inland sea roughly the size of Lake Tahoe.

By the 1950s, the Salton Sea had become a resort destination — Frank Sinatra, the Beach Boys, speedboats, developers calling it the California Riviera.

Then the water started dying.

No outflow. No way to flush the salt, pollution, and farm runoff.

First the fish. Then the birds.

Today, the Salton Sea is one of the most toxic environmental disasters in America.

An engineer’s mistake created a sea.

Nobody ever built a way to undo it.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/8LRFFJVbqnY

Just a short video, I’ve not heard of any of this previously and found it of interest.

Yes it is interesting, but be aware that the Salton Sea was an ephemeral lake even before the 1905 intervention and the later farmland runoff environmental disaster.

It is geologically interesting, too. There is a fabulous exposure (approaching 100%) of the San Andreas Fault Zone including all it’s various attending faults, on the eastern margin of the Salton Sea, in a place called “Painted Canyon”.

It was also the setting for “The Monster That Challenged The World” from 1957.