As Salton Sea faces ecological collapse, a plan to save it with ocean water is rejected By the World Meteorological Organization
In a scene reminiscent of the film Titanic, more than 30,000 people descended on the Salton Sea, a salt water lake in southern California, on Monday, May 12, as part of a 10-day conference on the environment called Salton Sea 4. The conference was held at the nearby Convention Center, where a giant screen was set up around the water to show the environmental impact of the sea.
I was there this week to check out a fascinating exhibit about the Salton Sea, which has been experiencing a huge decline in surface salinity over the last century.
The exhibit shows how as the Salton sea has shrunk by more than 600,000 acre feet (28.6 square miles) of salt water, as well as how the freshwater lake is gradually drying up, and how this is having a massive impact on the ecosystem.
The problem is, the Salton Sea is so huge — over three times larger than the Great Salt Lake in Utah — that the salinity is almost irrelevant compared to its impact on a much smaller ecosystem.
But it is important because it illustrates the problems and the opportunities that exist when you have a body of water with a lot of land in it. The Salton Sea is one example of a very small body of water having a big impact on the global environment — and it’s not even the biggest one of the big.
It’s an open question, in fact, whether the ocean can be saved from collapse. We’ve already seen such a drastic decline in global sea levels over the last century that we need to have a serious conversation about why things are like they are right now.
So this week, I went to the Salton Sea 4 conference as part of a series of three trips down to the Salton Sea as part of a project called Ocean Wants to Save the Salton Sea. This project is part of a larger group, called Ocean Wants to Save the World, that has been working for years on the idea of finding a way to preserve and revive the Salton Sea.
This project explores the idea of creating a “Green New Deal” for the Salton Sea, where humanity saves this ecosystem and creates a clean, renewable and sustainable ecosystem for the next generation.