Salton Sea

[caption id="attachment_3797" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Icelandic geothermal plant. Courtesy Gretar Ivarsson via Wikimedia Commons"][/caption]

I forgot to mention in my posts last week about visiting the Salton Sea that the biggest things on the horizon there are geothermal energy plants. When I first saw one, whizzing by at 60 mph in the 5:30 a.m. half-light, I thought, "It looks like a miniature refinery."

In the light of day they look a bit different. My first brush with geothermal came close in time to what looks like a light-of-day-type revelation coming out of Germany regarding geothermal energy. There, scientists say geothermal appears to have caused an earthquake last month.

Now, geothermal has lots of potential to help slow down the rate of global warming, as my erstwhile colleague Tom Paulson has written about.

Our reporting trip to the Salton Sea is over, and we're headed back over the mountains to LA catch a plane. I'd love to stay a few more days, because it's turning out that the Salton Sea is a man-bites-dog story in another sense from the one I cited yesterday.

Here's why: After years of hearing about how the agriculture that surrounds this key stop on the Pacific Flyway is harming the sea, it now turns out that ag and the Sea's defenders are making common cause.

That's because what the farmers need is water. And what the Sea needs is water. And they're both going to lose it.

As part of a massive reordering of the way water is used in Southern California, something like 2oo,000 acre-feet of water a year -- that's roughly 100,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools -- will be withdrawn from use by farmers whose Imperial Valley fields surround the Sea.

Now, you need to understand that water flows into the sea, but not out. Something like six feet of water evaporates every year. And why is it a "sea" if it's inland? Because the Colorado River water that's diverted into the farm fields around here carries with it a small amount of salt, along with pesticides, fertilizer and selenium. Over the years, water dumped on the farm fields flowed eventually into the sea, carrying its light load of salt. But as the water evaporated, it left behind a larger and larger load of salt. (Update/clarification 9/12/09: I realize in re-reading this that it might not be clear that a lot of the salt ending up in the sea is actually leached from the farm fields immediately surrounding it. I guess I also should have mentioned that the Salton Sea already is saltier than seawater.)

So long as water continues to flow into the sea, and continues to evaporate, the water gets saltier and saltier.

I'm in Southern California, on the shores of the famous Salton Sea, gathering information for a forthcoming InvestigateWest project on the Pacific Flyway.

This is the desert -- albeit one with water running all over the place in concrete aqueducts, and green fields of hay, courtesy of the irrigation.