Anything about Anza Borrego that does not fit into one of the other forums.
Salton Sea Documentary "Breaking Point"
tommy750 Posts: 1049
6/23/2016
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Breaking Point is a documentary detailing ominous issues affecting the Salton Sea. Was just released on DVD a few days ago and is available for free if you have Amazon Prime: https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Point-Bill-Wisneski/dp/B01GU3TTES/ref=sr_1_1?s=movies-tv&ie=UTF8&qid=1466715087&sr=1-1&keywords=breaking+point+documentary
Here's a Desert Report article from earlier this year: http://www.desertreport.org/?p=1704
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dsefcik Administrator Posts: 2624
6/28/2016
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Thanks Tom, just watched this last night...who knew all of that about the Salton Sea....
-- http://www.sefcik.com http://www.darensefcik.com http://www.carrizogorge.com
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tommy750 Posts: 1049
6/28/2016
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Interesting times indeed for the remains of Ancient Lake Cahuilla. At the end of next year, the 800,000 acre feet of water guaranteed by the 2003 Quantification Settlement Agreement to maintain the sea level in spite of reduced agricultural runoff (due to conservation and fallowing) will have been delivered and no more is anticipated. The delivery was intended to tide the sea over till a permanent solution to expanding shorelines with exposed toxic sediment would be in place in the far distant year 2017. Well, guess what, 2017 ain't that far off and neither are the toxic dust storms! The documentary's two mentioned funding sources, geothermal energy and Lithium extraction, don't seem to have become the hoped for panacea as geothermal is much less lucrative than initially though and the much hyped startup Simbol Materials' plan to extract lithium from geothermal brine is over as the company has apparently failed. So, basically we're doomed... Always though filling the sea with actual sea water (like the good old pre-Colorado River sediment blocking off the the upper gulf days) would be such an ingenious plan but the $30-40B price to build the pipeline seems to dampened some of the initial enthusiasm.
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RobertMarcos Posts: 23
7/5/2016
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Thanks for sharing that terrific movie. As a kid I used to swim in the Salton Sea. I even went waterskiing once. More recently it's a smelly mess. Hard to believe that any fish can survive at all, yet more continue to wash up every week.
Although the sea has filled and then dried-up countless times over the centuries, the pollutants we've added to it would wreak havoc on the residents of the Coachella Valley, if the sea is allowed to completely dry up. As a resident of La Quinta, (near Indio), I can tell you that the wind brings the smell of the Salton Sea westward, about once or twice a year. Two years ago the smell travelled all the way to Los Angeles, where it was reported on the front page of the LA Times.
Coincidentally a similar thing occurred in Russia, when the Aral Sea dried up... http://www.columbia.edu/~tmt2120/introduction.htm
best wishes - robert
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dsefcik Administrator Posts: 2624
7/5/2016
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RobertMarcos wrote:
Coincidentally a similar thing occurred in Russia, when the Aral Sea dried up... http://www.columbia.edu/~tmt2120/introduction.htm
That's a subject I have not heard in awhile...back in the mid 1990's I was working at UCSD as part of a project called VisEarth and I was helping to stitch together high resolution satellite images of the earth. One of the projects was the Aral Sea. I remember meeting and working with Sally Ride at the time. Thanks for bringing back some very fond memories for me, I really enjoyed working there and with all of the amazing people who were mentoring the project.
-- http://www.sefcik.com http://www.darensefcik.com http://www.carrizogorge.com
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