Trench Warfare at the Salton Sea

Crimes Against Humanity – by Celeste

An eerie $9 billion dollar trench experiment is being conducted at the Salton Sea which could trigger a spasm resulting in the cataclysmic ‘Big One’.  As if describing Biblical prophecy, a Scripps geophysicist, discusses the project located in one of the most tectonically active places in North America, “Imagine you’re 9 months pregnant,” says Kent Graham and, “You’re somehow coming to the end of a process.”  

During the 1950-60′s this artificial lake became a desert oasis. It was once toasted as the Riviera drawing land speculators, vacationers, and those who would green the desert with it’s abundant resources.  Today the Salton Sea is a skeleton and what futurists envision for their post-human era.

The Salton Sea was accidentally created in 1905 when an irrigation canal burst diverting the Colorado River into the Salton Basin.  It took two years for the environmental disaster to be rectified.  Several years later it began to creep back into an ecological nightmare that may get worse, before it gets better.

Image:  Bob Reynold Gallery

The Salton Sea is situated in a hostile environment with a unique landscape of contrasts.  The desolate area of brilliant sand-dunes are interrupted by a periwinkle sea crusted round about its edges with salt.  Long purple shadows stretch across the desert while marvelous sunsets paint the skies with color. Mud oozes up from the depths forming mud volcanoes and depression bowls that appear to be out-of-this-world.  Geothermal vents hiss up from the earth’s crust creating small geyser’s and scalding hot pools. As life is squeezed out of the sea through rising salinity and toxins the color wildly vacillates from orange to green as oxygen deficiency creates algae blooms.  This is an apocalyptic scene with sparse remnants of a once thriving human community.

Experts believed that the artificial lake would evaporate during hot summers after California began diverting tributaries that naturally fed the lake.  Waters did not begin to flow again into the Salton Sea until the United States and Mexico signed a treaty that brought Mexico’s raw sewage to the inland lake creating a cesspool.

Paradise Lost: The Life and Death of the Salton Sea

The ‘New River’ into the Salton Sea seethes with pathogens such as tuberculosis, encephalitis, polio, cholera, hepatitis, and thyroid.  Swirling in the murky waters are dead animals, garbage, high fecal colonies, contaminants, volatile organic compounds, heavy metals, pesticides, agricultural runoff, uranium, mercury, and lithium which may be extracted from the sea to the tune of billions in profit for private industry.

If the Salton Sea dries up it could become a lethal ‘dust bowl’ bioweapon sweeping death at least 500 miles to residents of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Las Vegas.  Compounding the threat, some agencies are considering sinking radioactive nuclear waste into the salt brines.  China’s toxic yellow cloud encircles the planet and it is unknown how far the Salton Sea dust could actually travel.

Despite possible consequences, California legislators and the state Department of Water Resources are curious about the ‘likely scenarios’ for earthquakes that could rupture the Salton Sea Trough.  As a result, researchers were lured to the Sea from San Diego State University and Scripps Institute of Oceanography.  They joined forces to dig trenches in the area in an effort to decode the history of past rupture events hidden in sedimentary layers.  Might the very act of digging trenches in one of the most tectonically active areas in North America trigger the ‘Big One’ sooner rather than later?

The Salton Sea is the location where three moving tectonic plates meet a triple junction among the Cocos, Pacific, and North American tectonic plates.  Southern California is not the only area that need be concerned with the tectonic activity of the Salton Sea.  The Rocky Mountains were created as a result of Farallon Plate action and over 20 million people live along the San Andres Fault alone.

Earthquakes occur every 200 years and it has been 335 years since the last quake event.  A catastrophic seismic event has the potential to turn Southern California’s highly populated cities into futuristic and surreal ghost towns.

As the excavators roll right on top of the San Andreas Fault, ‘all eyes’ are on the Salton Sea.  The Obama Administration is handing out federal funding, and Emergency Management is keenly watching the activities along with eyes in the sky,  MODIS satellite, and the International Space Station, as well as private industry, geothermal energy, nuclear agencies seeking a repository for radioactive waste,  NOAA, environmentalists, economists, hydrologists all watching to see what the end fate will be for the the Salton Sea and all those who are impacted by this tectonically charged area.

“Imagine you’re 9 months pregnant.  You’re somehow coming to the end of a process.” 

Pioneers saw this area as a death trap. 

There, but by the grace of God, go the rest of us.

 

Resources:

The Shaky Future of the Salton Sea

The Salton Sea Catastrophe

Scripps Podcast:  The Salton Sea  (Images)

The Accidental Sea:  Apocalypse Come Early (Images)

Paradise Lost: The Life and Death of the Salton Sea (Images)

SEMP:  Suburban Emergency Management Project-2008

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