How is the salton sea formed

Its average dimensions tend to be 24 by 56 km in width and length respectively. Average annual inflow tends to be 1. It sits in the lowest part of the Salton Basin which covers an area of 8, square miles of southern California and Northern Mexico. The soils of the area are very fertile for reasons we will explain later. This is perfect for farming except for one critical resource - abundant water.

To combat this an irrigation system was planned and construction began in A network of canals was built across the Southernmost part of the Salton Basin.

So far so good but the canals would prove to be too small to handle flood waters and were poorly built. Almost inevitably disaster struck when, in , heavy rainfall combined with snowmelt poured into one of the canals from the nearby Colorado River. This deluge proved too much for the systems dikes and broke through the canal's headworks.

Repair works began immediately and for the next 18 months engineers battled with the resultant flooding - but to no avail. With the canal's levees now breached and no means to stop the constant gush of water from the Colorado River, flood water flowed unabated into the massive basin.

This event created two new rivers the New and Alamo and the freshwater lake that would come to be known as the Salton Sea. Flooding was eventually halted in but the nearby town of Salton could not be saved and was submerged. Ordinarily, if left to its own devices, the lake would have eventually dried up. Average evaporation rates for the region are around cm per annum with precipitation rates a mere 5.

In Congres needed somewhere to deposit agricultural wastewater, especially from the Imperial Valley. It was decided to use the manmade lake as a repository for this runoff a process still ongoing to this day. The modern-day Salton Sea lies within a large geological depression, called a Graben , that formed around 5 million years ago. Its formation led to the inundation of the area by the Pacific Ocean that formed a large inland sea that covered large parts of Southern California.

Throughout the ice age of the Pleistocene, over a period of around 3 million years, a large river delta from the Colorado River formed, continually depositing sediment into the area. This delta eventually grew to reach the western shore of the Gulf of California and effectively created a barrier to cut the area, now called the Salton Basin, off from the Pacific Ocean in the Gulf. It makes you wonder what happened here. At the beginning of the 20th century, as farmers set up shop in the hot desert climate of the Imperial Valley, they needed to tap into the Colorado River to irrigate their crops.

To enable this, the California Development Company dredged two intake gorges without the use of floodgates. However, in the summer of , the flow of water stopped as the intakes became clogged with silt deposits from the Colorado River. Another intake gorge was created. Once again a floodgate was omitted. In , these human engineering errors allowed saline water to be carried from a flooded Colorado River into the Salton Sink area, thus creating the present-day Salton Sea.

Geologic studies show that the Colorado River spilled into the Salton Basin many times over the millennia, creating intermittent lakes. So the basin has a long history of alternately hosting a fresh water lake and being a dry, empty desert basin — according to the balance between inflow and evaporative loss. Organizers cancelled the event in light of the coronavirus, although they still published research that was to be presented.

Several papers this year took on Salton Sea issues, as mitigating environmental and health concerns around the shrinking body of water are a hot-button issue. The state of California has only completed one dust suppression project covering acres , but it has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to restore wetland habitat and tamp down toxic dust blowing off exposed playa.

After more than a decade of negotiations, the Quantification Settlement Agreement came into effect in This deal — known, and hated, around the Imperial Valley as the "QSA" — saw hundreds of thousands of acre feet of water per year transferred from the Imperial Irrigation District to the San Diego County Water Authority and other parties.

This agreement decreased agricultural runoff into the sea, worsening the current situation. Now, plans that have been proposed to manage dust billowing from the quickly drying seabed range from only saving deeper, central portions of it to piping Sea of Cortez water across international borders to refill the basin.

Ross's review of historical and scientific records suggested that floods similar to those between and had been occurring in the region for at least tens of thousands of years, sustaining other bodies of water.

Evidence pointed to the Colorado River's floodplain and delta — that area that would now dump into the Sea of Cortez if the river freely flowed that far — being prone to meander in what Ross described as a "maze of constantly shifting distributary channels. The piece of history that's truly unusual, she said, is how much the Colorado River has been hemmed in by dams and levees ever since.