PHOTO SERIES
Vanishing Oasis:
Death and Decay
at the Salton Sea
Once a thriving resort in the desert,
California’s largest lake has become
a toxic wasteland—and one of the most
vexing and complicated environmental
problems in the American West.
Words and Images
by Scott London
The Salton Sea was created by accident more than a century ago. After a season of unusually heavy rainfall, the Colorado River broke through an irrigation canal and poured into California’s Coachella and Imperial valleys. The flooding continued for nearly two years before engineers were able to repair the breach. By then a vast lake had formed that covered some four hundred square miles.
Over the next half-century, runoff from the Imperial Valley’s huge farming operations offset much of the annual evaporation and kept the lake viable. The place soon became an inland destination, attracting boaters, water skiers, and vacationers. Anglers flocked to the sea after it was stocked with fish from the Gulf of California.
By the 1950s, resorts and subdivisions began cropping up along the shore. Developers hailed it as America’s “New Riviera.” Like nearby Las Vegas, it became a playground for celebrities like Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and soon attracted more visitors per year than Yosemite National Park.
Dead and dying palm trees are all that remain of the Salton Bay Yacht Club, a once-popular resort and lure for celebrities in the 1950s and ’60s.
The Salton Sea became a popular destination, but there were problems. The agricultural runoff feeding the lake was driving up its salinity, making the ecosystem increasingly uninhabitable for fish and the birds that fed on them. The runoff was also laden with pesticides, heavy metals and even raw sewage from across the Mexican border.
In the late 1970s, a series of tropical storms brought record rainfall to southeastern California. The Salton Sea has no natural outlet so the water level rose by more than ten feet, inundating shoreline communities and forcing out local residents.
The floodwaters eventually receded, but the health of the sea continued to deteriorate. In recent years, it has reached a critical tipping point. The water is now receding. The birds are disappearing. The air is hazardous to breathe. And little remains of the once-thriving communities and resorts along the shore.
What is playing out at the Salton Sea is more than simply a story of boom and bust, as it’s often portrayed in the media. It’s also a story about a neglected corner of the American West now facing a confluence of crises, from drought and pollution to poverty and mismanagement.
At Salton Sea Beach, a community of about 500 on the west shore, charred palm trees mark the spot of a once-bustling marina.
The Salton Sea has become one of the most vexing and complicated environmental problems in the American West. As the shoreline recedes, contaminants in the lakebed from a century’s worth of agricultural runoff are exposed to the air. When the wind kicks up, these pollutants create toxic dust clouds that pose health risks not only to residents of surrounding communities but to people throughout southern California.
For decades federal and state officials largely ignored the problems at the Salton Sea. Today there are a number of piecemeal restoration efforts underway. But experts say the projects are too small in scale and too far behind schedule to do more than mitigate the worst effects of the crisis playing out at the sea. And there is still no consensus about how to address the looming environmental disaster—much less a comprehensive action plan for solving it.
In Bombay Beach and two other locations, the Salton Sea Management Program along with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are using strawbales across 1,700 acres of exposed lakebed to seed native vegetation and combat dust.
My photos of the Salton Sea originated as a series for the San Diego Natural History Museum in 2008. I have continued to document the decline of the sea since then, turning the series into a long-term documentary project that now spans the better part of two decades. Some of the photographs have appeared in magazines and newspapers, including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Los Angeles Times and the Baltimore Sun. What follows are some highlights from the project.
The Salton Sea lies nearly 240 feet below sea level in one of the most inhospitable deserts in North America. At the height of summer, the air is heavy and thick with brine flies. The heat can be crushing with temperatures often reaching 120 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Salton Sea has no natural outlet, so the surface level rises and falls depending on inflows and evaporation. The salt deposits on the trunks of these dead cottonwoods show how the water level has fluctuated over time. In recent years, the water has been rapidly receding due to dwindling inflows, persistent drought and the effects of climate change.
The water level has dropped dramatically over the last decade. These two photos, made at the site of a former county park on the north shore, show how the waterline is retreating like an outgoing tide.
As the Salton Sea dries up, old piers—like these near Red Hill on the south shore—are left standing on dry land, thousands of feet from the water’s edge.
The receding water has exposed vast swaths of dry lakebed. It has also left behind hypersaline pools, some of which have turned blood red. The change of color is a result of halophiles—salt-loving microbes that thrive in extremely saline environments.
As the water level has dropped, marinas around the Salton Sea have become landlocked. In Desert Shores, the canals—or “keys,” as the locals call them—have turned into stagnant pools of noxious red water.
For all its natural beauty, the Salton Sea reeks of death and decay. When the winds kick up, the pungent, sulfurous odor can be carried as far afield as Palm Springs and Los Angeles. Some years ago, the Los Angeles Times complained of an “epic stink” of unknown origin spreading across southern California. Its source was later traced to the bottom of the Salton Sea.
The Salton Sea is a major stopover along the Pacific Flyway—the migratory bird route that extends from Alaska to Patagonia. Here double-crested cormorants roost along the south shore.
A decade ago, the Salton Sea was teeming with birdlife and supported hundreds of species, including large populations of brown and white pelicans, snowy egrets, American avocets, western sandpipers, black-necked stilts, California gulls and other shorebirds.
Today the birds are disappearing. The lake has become too salty for the fish and invertebrates they feed on, and many of their habitats have been lost as the water has receded.
This tree once stood in 6-8 feet of water. Herons nested in its branches, protected from coyotes, raccoons, and other land animals. But as the water level dropped, the birds were no longer safe from predators. These photos, taken two years apart, show how rapidly the water is receding along the south shore.
A decade ago, great blue herons nested in this dead cottonwood tree near Obsidian Butte, guarding over their chicks like sentinels in the night. Today the tree stands abandoned on dry land.
The soundscape of the Salton Sea is changing. As the birds disappear, so do the characteristic sounds they make—the birdsong, the noisy chatter, the loud calls of flocks on the move. Today many areas along the shore are pervaded by an eerie silence.
The Salton Sea is one of the saltiest bodies of water in the world. This is due in large part to the agricultural runoff that has sustained the lake over the last century. As the water evaporates—a process that is accelerating due to the effects of climate change—the salt and minerals from the runoff become increasingly concentrated.
Today the Salton Sea is almost twice as saline as the ocean—too salty even for the hardy tilapia, one of the last remaining fish species to survive in the lake. Fish die-offs became a regular occurrence in the 1990s and 2000s as rising salinity and excessive desert heat depleted the water of oxygen. In August 2006, more than one million dead tilapia washed up on the shores of the Salton Sea in less than a week.
Today there are few if any fish left in the Salton Sea. The dead tilapia that regularly washed up on shore have been replaced by dead birds—like this pelican found near Desert Shores. Wildlife biologists don’t know why so many birds are dying, but they believe the cause is starvation. They say the Salton Sea’s ecosystem has reached a critical tipping point where it can no longer support wildlife.
The Salton Sea is fed by wastewater. Some of it flows into the lake from the New River and its tributaries on the south shore, as seen here. The New River has been called the most polluted waterway in the United States. It carries not only agricultural runoff from farms in the Imperial Valley but also municipal sewage and industrial wastewater from Mexicali, a city of one million across the Mexican border.
Since the Salton Sea has no natural outlet, the hazardous waste flowing into the lake has collected on the bottom over many years. Now, as the water recedes—as seen here near the mouth of the New River—the exposed lakebed is drying up and turning into a fine, caustic dust laced with decades’ worth of contaminants, including heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and cadmium, and the highly toxic insecticide DDT.
Strong winds blowing off the exposed lakebed create whiteout conditions along the west shore. Given the high concentration of mercury, arsenic, selenium and other trace elements in the dust, these storms have become a serious public health risk.
The environmental troubles facing the Salton Sea, from fluctuating water levels and creeping salinity to severe drought and now toxic dust pollution, have wreaked havoc on communities along the shore. Many area residents have fled. Those who remain live a “marginal and peculiar” existence, in the words of The New Yorker‘s Dana Goodyear. “These people are waiting for something that will never come: enough water to bring the good times back.”
In the late 1970s, flooding laid waste to communities around the Salton Sea. A series of tropical storms brought so much rain to the area that the surface of the lake rose by several feet. The floodwaters shattered the dreams of not only homeowners but also land developers who had pitched the Salton Sea as California’s “New Riviera.”
Flooding inundated the entire waterfront of Bombay Beach in the late 1970s, turning the resort community it into a virtual ghost town. By 2005, when this photo was taken, the marina and parts of a waterfront trailer park were still under several feet of water.
The floodwaters at Bombay Beach eventually receded, leaving behind a wasteland of salt-encrusted debris. This trailer, which sat half-submerged in reddish-brown water for over a decade, became a well-known symbol of the Salton Sea after appearing on a book cover and in a documentary film about the place.
In recent years, artists have taken over many of the abandoned structures of Bombay Beach, transforming them into makeshift gathering places, performance spaces, and canvases for graffiti art.
In 2016, a filmmaker and two arts patrons from Los Angeles mounted a renegade art gathering over a long weekend to celebrate creativity, music and ideas as well as to spotlight the environmental crisis playing out at the Salton Sea. With a twist of irony, they called it the Bombay Beach Biennale. (See separate photo essay here.)
The gathering was the first of what has since become an annual event, one that has generated buzz in the art world and made headlines in newspapers and magazines. Here salt-encrusted pilings from an old fishing pier serve as a fitting backdrop for “Atlantis,” an installation by artists Marco Walker and Tomek Sadurski at the 2019 Bombay Beach Biennale.
At the 2023 Bombay Beach Biennale, artists Memymom and Sean Guerrero positioned their installation, “The Fourth Hatch,” a few feet out from the receding shoreline.
The Salton Sea is situated along the San Andreas Fault and seismologists believe the area is overdue for a major earthquake. Like many tectonic hotspots, it also has a lot of geothermal activity. There are several extensive seep fields along the south shore where geothermal mud volcanoes and sulfurous mud pots sputter throughout the day.
In the 1960s and ’70s, thermal spas and resorts along the south shore touted the health benefits of their mineral baths. But the geothermal activity made the ground unstable. At this abandoned spa near Red Hill, a well collapsed, creating a large sink hole that nearly swallowed up one of the bathhouses.
Eleven geothermal plants operate along the south shore of the Salton Sea, generating renewable energy for California and Arizona. This plant in the “Hell’s Kitchen” geothermal field is being retrofitted with new technology that, if successful, will allow it to not only produce clean energy but also mine lithium—vital for the production of lithium-ion batteries used in electric cars. The vast deposits of lithium in the geothermal brine beneath the Salton Sea could be a game-changer for the Imperial Valley, potentially turning it into the epicenter of the burgeoning lithium industry.
In Bombay Beach and two other locations, the Salton Sea Management Program along with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation are using strawbales across 1,700 acres of exposed lakebed to seed native vegetation and combat dust. The restoration projects are promising, but they are by most accounts too small in scale and too far behind schedule to do more than mitigate the worst effects of the crisis at the Salton Sea.
In Bombay Beach, artist Steven “Shig” Scott put up a metal installation bearing the letters SOS. For those who live in the communities along the shore, the letters are both a distress signal and an urgent plea to “Save Our Sea.”
