This California desert could hold the key to powering all of America’s electric cars
The Salton Sea Basin feels almost alien. It lies where two enormous chunks of the Earth’s crust, the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate, are very slowly pushing past one another creating an enormous low spot in the land. It’s a big, flat gray desert ringed with high mountains that look pale in the distance. It’s hot and, deep underground, it is literally boiling. The Salton Sea, which lies roughly in the middle of the massive geologic low point, isn’t really a sea, at all. The largest inland lake in California, it’s 51 miles long from north to south and 17 miles wide, but gradually shrinking as less and less water flows into it.