John Waters narrating.
I took my family there in a trip we also saw Las Vegas, the Mt Palomar telescope, LA tar pits, and Palm Springs. It is too disgusting to be educational. At least when we went it stank to high heaven and we ended up with rotting fish flesh all over our pants. The dumb dog liked it. Everyone else uses it as a cautionary tale about letting me chose destinations for vacation. Getting 10x existing Lithium production would be great use of it.
There are some extremely good date palm farms north of it. It you like figs and dates, check them out.
It's a pretty unique/interesting watch.
You should have added slab city to the itinerary.
I drove around the Salton Sea, but didn’t know the history. Every little “town” around it was dead (although there were signs of restoration in progress). It’s an amazing American post-apocalypse experience, mad max in America style.
> In the 1950s and into the 1960s, the communities expanded as the area's reputation as a resort destination and sport fishery grew.[18] Hotels and yacht clubs were built on the shore along with homes and schools.[19] Resorts in communities like Bombay Beach hosted entertainers such as Frank Sinatra, The Beach Boys and Bing Crosby.[20] Yacht clubs held parties at night and golf courses provided recreation.[19] Many people came for boating activities such as water skiing and fishing as stocked fish proliferated.[21] Lakeshore communities grew as vacation homes were built.[15] More than 1.5 million visitors visited annually at the peak.[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea#Agriculture,_touris...
The future could be calculated from a salinity chart and still people bought and sold expensive homes.
The place has managed to avoid accumulating the truly destructive squatter elements (e.g people with severe mental illness or substance abuse problems,though meth is a problem) because it is remote, there are no services, and it is dangerously hot during the summer time. Thus, it's pretty hard to live there without at least a modest RV and some planning, which has made it a bit more inviting and interesting than the usual homeless encampment.
Like Ludendorff holidaying covertly to the fortifications at Liège in Belgium prior to World War 1.
Kids sour faced in the back seats wishing you worked at Disney.
I wouldn't recommend it. The route we took was through a residential area. The neighbors did not seem like they wanted us to be there. We went to the water's edge, smelled the "objectionable," "noxious," "unique," and "pervasive" odor (as described by the US Geological Survey), looked at the shitty beach, and left. There's not much to do.
There's a neighborhood by me which has earned a similar reputation and the residents have been known to tell slum tourists to leave.
Its gross. Don't do that.
The key of course, is to travel with respect. Bombay Beach is probably not a place for casual selfies and party times.
There is still beauty there, for people who can look past the unpleasant. A state visitor center with the whole wild history of the place. Beaches made out of pulverized tilapia bone and shell. Fields of obsidian. The zonked-out but earnest spirituality of Salvation Mountain. Date shakes from Westmorland. Endless sun.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050722/
tl;dr "An earthquake in the Salton Sea unleashes a horde of prehistoric mollusk monsters. Discovering the creatures, a Naval officer and several scientists attempt to stop the monsters, but they escape into the canal system of the California's Imperial Valley and terrorize the populace"
“The tilapia raised on Mars were taken from the Salton Sea population…”
There are fish that can survive various levels of salt and other conditions. But if the conditions were right for them to survive, reproduce, etc, then why suddenly die? It seems like there could be a cycle since other said they experienced the same die off, but then what is the cause of the cycle and how do any survive to create the carcasses for the next die-off?
https://speciesfishing.com/fishing-the-salton-sea/
There are periodic mass die offs. The most common is because of botulism.
Avian botulism, caused by bacteria, usually occurs in the spring time when the winds are very strong and push all of the old, deoxygenated water from the bottom of the Salton Sea to the top, depleting the oxygen available for the fish, causing them to die. As the fish die, the birds eat them, and get sick from contracting the bacteria. The birds then die and get feasted on by maggots which then infect birds feasting on the maggots. This can result in massive bird mortality. The species most affected by avian botulism are waterfowl and shorebirds.
Collapse is not instantaneous. Nor is it all-encompassing. Even left unchecked for another 100 years, you would still find some forms of life present, but not the ones you see today.
In Tecopa (sorta) - right next to Death Valley.
That's a good thing
You're just passing through where they LIVE
Bombay Beach was scary and depressing.
The smell was fine when I was there but there are frequent massive fish die offs.
Something has to be done about it though. If it dries up (irrigation runoff feeds the lake but irrigation is getting more efficient causing less runoff) then the dry lake bed will blow over Palm Springs and other towns in the area. It's full of toxic dust now.
Migrating birds also use it as a stopover point because we have gotten rid of so many natural wetlands.
I think it's the only semilegal squatting village in California
I’ve only been in winter, which I’m sure helps. I certainly wouldn’t want to go in >100 degree heat.
You can always make things worse.
So I hope this will not be an excuse to be even more careless with the exploitation, even though more lithium is beneficial, too.
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Anyone know how recoverable Lithium is from Lithium batts? Does the Lithium degrade/denature/deconstruct over time in all lithium batteries? How bad for the environment is all the Lithium we are throwing out with all these used up batteries?
(Though the guy was drinking the stuff as a supplement, which probably affected his personality a bit)
Are they the same lithium salts that are prescribed as medication for certain psychological disorders?
Dunno if modern medications may also include other active-ingredients to compliment lithium, but lithium itself is pretty much the same thing as sodium or potassium in terms of its simplicity as a chemical species.
Since lithium has a +1 charge as a cation (positively charged ion) in salt, it needs to be balanced with an anion (negatively charged ion), so the exact salt can vary in solid-form. But once it dissolves in water, such as in the body, then it's not really bound to the anion anymore and so the exact anion it was originally ingested with isn't particularly important.
Apparently some people used to drink [mineral water with lithium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithia_water).
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithium_(medication)
Seems possible; not sure of economic value at this particular point in history. There's a bunch of recent headlines about trivial extraction of lithium from seawater, so might get less economically feasible if those techs pan out. OTOH, even if it's not obviously worth it, you could try burying it all in one place and then 'mine' it once the economics swing towards recovery.