Most of you have heard that California’s Salton Sea would not currently exist were it not for the nearly 1 million acre feet of agricultural runoff that’s drained into it every year. … Meanwhile 132 miles south in Sonora another body of water has formed from American-made runoff, and it’s also a paradox. Ciénega de Santa Clara is technically a brackish water wetland consisting of marshlands and lagoons, and its classification as “anthropogenic” stems from the fact that it was inadvertently created by, and entirely sustained by human engineering. This “human engineering” began in 1965 after the U.S.Bureau of Reclamation rerouted approximately 100,000 acre feet of salty runoff from the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation District away from the Colorado River and 13 miles into Mexico.