It’s a place of uncommon natural beauty, an inland oasis teeming with wildlife surrounded by unrelenting desert. But things are not quite what they seem at the Salton Sea. The lake is shrinking. The fish are dying. The birds are ailing. And the once-thriving communities along the shore are mostly abandoned. The Salton Sea is an ecological catastrophe just waiting to happen. This photoessay looks at the stark beauty of the place while at the same time documenting some of the effects of environmental decline and devastation.