The Salton Sea spans California’s Imperial and Coachella valleys. It is a shallow, saline, endorheic rift lake located directly on the San Andreas Fault. Once, the Salton Sea was an exquisite oasis - surrounded by palm trees and pink flamingos, celebrated golf courses and vacation homes for celebrities.There was a time its bustling shores attracted more visitors per year than Yosemite.

The sea was created, accidentally, in 1905, when flood waters breached a nearby canal, sending the full force of the Colorado River into a dry, ancient lake bed called the Salton Sink. It took nearly two years to patch the breach. In that time, a lake almost twice the size of Lake Tahoe sprang to life.

By the mid-20th century, local developers had dubbed the accident as a miracle, nicknaming the area “the Salton Riviera.” Palm trees were planted and marinas were built. President Eisenhower shot a round at the Salton City Golf Course and the Beach Boys came to dock their boat at the North Shore Beach and Yacht Club.

However, by the end of the 1970s, something smelled fishy. “One year the beaches were covered in dead fish — it was a real oddity,” says a visitor. Then, it happened again the next year. Powerful tropical storms in the late 1970s flooded the region and destroyed much of the picturesque scenery, washing away investments that never returned. Vacationers stopped coming.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the sea was trapped in a liturgical cycle of ecological collapse. With only the rare desert rainstorm and salty, nutrient-rich farm runoff to feed it, the seawater grew more salinated every year. Large algae blooms choked the water of oxygen, causing fish to drown. Decomposing fish bodies along the shore gave birth to massive blooms of algae, kickstarting the cycle all over again. In the summer of 1999, almost eight million tilapia died in a single day, their corpses spread along the shore in a spectacle that measured three miles wide and ten miles long.

As the sea decayed, so did vacation communities like Salton City, Desert Shores and Bombay Beach. A documentary (2004) about the Salton Sea, narrated by John Waters, captures a cross-section of the residents who now populate these towns: elderly retirees clinging to the dreams they’d bought into, individuals fleeing from Los Angeles looking for a cheaper lifestyle away from urban violence and strange, offbeat personalities who gravitate towards the sea’s latest incarnation. “It’s the greatest sewer the world has ever seen,“ said one resident. “Leave it that way.”

Though it’s been shrinking for decades, on January 1st, 2018, the Salton Sea entered a full nosedive. Due to a water transfer agreement with San Diego, 40% less water will now flow into the sea. Receding dramatically, the already shallow surface level will drop 20 feet. By 2045, the Salton Sea’s waters are estimated to become 5X as salty as the Pacific Ocean and will kill whatever fish still live there and relocate the birds that feed on them.

As the shoreline recedes dramatically each year, the waterfront communities of Desert Shores, Salton City and Bombay Beach — replete with docks and marinas — will become marooned. Over 60,000 acres of playa will be exposed over the next decade in this region, developing a poison of dust that has already begun to impact the region. Large percentages of the residents suffer from asthma. The dust in the air resulting from a receding sea, mitigated by run-offs from surrounding farm lands; thus, adding pesticides to the allergens swirling in the atmosphere, pose a physical threat to all who live along the Salton Sea today.

Once a beautiful body of water, full of vibrancy, high economic development and life, the Salton Sea now slowly dies receding every year at an alarming rate. California’s State Legislature is looking into solutions to the dust playa in Coachella and Imperial valleys, but unless remediations begin in earnest, environmental and human life will be impacted on a large scale.

Written and resourced from Michael Zelenko’s article “As California’s largest lake dries up, it threatens nearby communities with clouds of toxic dust” at www.theverge.com