Essay: The last resort
… The Salton Sea is California’s largest lake—and, many say, its greatest environmental blunder. Born of periodic floods from the Colorado River, it is not a lake that is meant to last. For millions of years, the river would breach its banks, fill the Salton Sink, then change its mind and meander back into the Gulf of California. Left without inflows and outflows, the water that remained would evaporate. That was the rhythm of this place: flood, shrink, repeat. Eventually, humans broke the pattern. Farmers arrived in the early 1900s, when the lake basin was dry. They claimed the fertile floodplain and tried to tame the river. They put bottles in the banks to mark their water claims. They dug canals and levees. Then came the biblical flood.
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