A Drive Around Salton Sea In 2021 - Is Salton Sea Drying Up? See How Much Smaller Salton Sea is Now

i'm at california's largest lake no i'm not talking about lake tahoe today i'm not doing a video about radio communications or off-roading well sort of about off-roading because a couple of the places i'm gonna go you need to go off-road to get to but this isn't an off-roading video today i'm at salton sea and i'm gonna go i'm gonna drive around the entire lake and i'm gonna show you i'm gonna stop at several of the most popular stops if you've ever been to salton sea if you ever went camping or visited chances are where i'm gonna stop today you've been to and i'm gonna show where the water levels are this is uh the end of march uh 2021 and as you probably know the state of california stopped diverting the last drops of water into the salton sea in 2017. they did that because san diego needs to keep their golf courses green priorities so when they did that in 2017 the water level of salton sea began to drop even though the level has been dropping steadily over the last several years it's really started dropping as of 2017. it does not stink you know there's a lot of ignorance stupidity out there about salt and sea i think yeah we'll do some myth busting today as well so at each stop that i make in addition to showing you the water level i'll try to bust at least one myth the first myth we're at our first stop here is that salton sea does not stink all the time it does you will get a aroma in summertime you may see a dead fish on the shoreline and that will give an aroma and also as the water heats up there's so much life and algae and stuff bubbling up in the water that it makes gas rise and that's really what you smell but right now it smells better than long beach now you may have noticed if you watch this channel i've done several videos about salt and sea just posted a few recently if you're familiar with me or if you follow my other channel you may know that i have a special connection with salton c not only did i used to camp here for almost every weekend for about 10 years as a kid back in the 1970s but in 2014 after not being here for 30 years i came back and did a little project down here which made me uh very familiar with the shoreline so i'm going to show you the levels of water where they are today in 2021. i'll mention where they were if it was a place i was at as a kid then i'll mention what the water level was like in 2014 and 15 and i'll show what it looks like today now this is the point where a lot of youtube channels would roll some stupid flashy intro with graphics and music and they'd beg for you to subscribe i'm not gonna do any of that so we're just gonna get started okay the first stop north shore beach yacht club right off of highway 111. let's sit there behind me in 2014 2015 this entire bay behind me was full i'd be underwater where i'm standing right now this is what it looks like today [Music] um [Music] stop number two uh salton sea water level tour 2021 i'm at corvina beach just a few miles south of the yacht club where i just was this place is the place i'm most familiar with because between 1976 and 1980 i camped here with my family hundreds of times every weekend and back then [Music] and back then the water level can you see the uh cliffs there that's where the water level was you'd walk a few feet from the little cliff there and you'd be in the water you'd be fishing so that's where the water was back in the 70s and 80s where i'm standing now is roughly where the water was in 2014 2015 give or take a few yards where the water level is now two or three hundred yards further that way so between 20 14 and 15 and today 2021 the water has gone down several hundred more yards when i was a kid in 1977 i wasn't even allowed to come out this far into the water too far from shore it's dangerous shark might have gotten me now a moment ago if you recall i mentioned swimming here as a kid swam here all the time everybody did when we're fishing and catching corvinas by the boatload literally so myth number two if we're on number two is that you can't swim in salt and sea you may not want to swim in salt and sea that's perfectly valid that's up to you yes you can swim in salton sea it is not full of poison the fish have not all died because of the poison the fish have died because it's getting too salty the fish die off every season in the summer because it gets hot the algae grows sucks all the oxygen out of the water the fish die they wash up oh the sewage that flows in from mexico yeah they fixed that decades ago i'm not saying the new river which is where that would come from is clean i wouldn't drink it but it's not flowing sewage like it did 40 years ago and according to state and private testing the water is perfectly fine for recreational use and swimming if you disagree leave a link to a source that says it's not safe to swim because if you say it's not safe to swim and leave a comment saying that i will call you out and i'll pin it to the top for everybody to see and make fun of you unless you have the link to a valid source for your claim [Music] we made it to bombay beach stop number three right behind me here is one of the uh big marinas that used to be full of water and as you can see now behind me the water level 100 150 yards out when i came through here in 2015 the water level it was about 50 yards closer so it's dropped quite a bit i'm down kind of inside one of the marinas now now the last time i was here there was still water in here you can see b get away so since i am at the bottom of one of the marinas what better time to talk about myth number three whatever salt and c myth we're on that myth is salt and sea is man-made sorta kinda this incantation of salt and sea started back in 1903 1905 i don't quote me because i'm an old man i don't remember by some person trying to divert some water from the colorado river and oops accidentally busted open a levee colorado river flowed unimpeded into salton sea for a couple of years that's what created the current salton sea as we know it it's not like a man-made lake where they go and they build a dam and they make a lake but is salt and sea man-made no not really technically no sort of yes i'll give you that one i'm at nyland marina now and i'm right inside the boat launch you can see that the boat launch is about 100 yards long from where i am in the 1970s i'd be under six feet of water when i was here in 2014 and 15 actually the water was quite a ways up there 10 or 20 yards but today the water is right here just in the last since 2015 till 2021 it's come down dozens of yards and from the 70s 100 yards or more now another myth it's not really a myth but i wanted to mention it one of the things that people complain about when they come to salton sea is about all the fish dead fish on the shore and in 2015 going all the way back into the 70s that was true in the summertime especially the algae would grow and the algae would grow too much and that's because of the fertilizers that would come in from the farms and as the algae grows it sucks the oxygen out of the water and that causes the fish to die wash up on the shore birds love it people hate it because it makes it stink today i have not seen one dead fish not one and if you've been here before you know that normally along the shore you'd be walking in a carpet of fish and fish bones it's not like that today and while some people may be happy great no fish it won't stink it's actually not great news because that means there ain't no more fish out there the scientists have been predicting for years that as the salinity rises the fish would die off it doesn't actually kill the fish it prevents them from reproducing and they've just reproduced out and also hardly any birds this place used to be covered in birds eating the fish not seen them [Music] it's the boat launch red hill marina the 1970s and 80s i'd be under water right now that's where you would launch your boat right here so i'm going to show you where the water is now but before i do that let's talk about another myth that myth is that salton sea is a volcano that's actually true the entire southern area of salton sea is a extinct ah not fully extinct there's still a little activity as you may know there's a lot of geothermal plants all around the south end of salton sea it's because it's still active there's mud volcanoes bubbling mud pots most people don't know about them it's a whole mud pot field you're not allowed to go down there now don't go down there i've been down there i had permission the san andreas fault starts right here right under my feet or it ends here it depends on which way you're facing every once in a while there'll be a earthquake swarm down in this area people get very nervous they say the salton sea super volcano could erupt not likely but possible so yes myth number whatever number i'm on now salton c is a volcano that's true southern half is or at least was sort of kind of is still little yeah so i'm still walking i've still got about 150 yards to go to get to where the water was when i came through here in 2015. this is gonna be a bit of a walk he's going to learn the hard way that that road ends it just drops off into nothing so i've just made it to the end of what was the marina that's a good 200 yards from where the water was in the 70s and 80s way back there okay so now i'm going to show you where the water was in 2015. it's gonna be a little walk it's all right i'm used to walking at salton sea google it as you probably know if you don't know i'm about to tell you because as salton sea dries up where i'm standing now like i said just a few years ago this was under water it exposes this dirt that's dirt and most of it's a very fine sand and when the wind blows it picks up the finest particles of it and those particles are soaked in runoff that has been coming from the farms for the last 90 years goes into the water doesn't really affect the water that's why it's safe to swim even still today but it's particulate and it sinks to the bottom grows in the mud now this is all that mud when the wind blows it blows up that extremely fine uh fine particulate blows it into palm springs as far as los angeles as far south as mexico arizona and that dust when you breathe it in it's poison it gives you cancer this is why when people say it's going to be a disaster when salt and seed dries up that's why not because it's sad that all the businesses went out of business and you can't ski there anymore it's because this what was mud exposed lake bed turns to dust flows into palm springs reduces the property values that's the disaster and it kills people too where i'm standing now is where in 2015 the water level was when we're further up north corvina beach north shore the yacht club the water level was down you know measured in 100 yards because we're in the south end the water's shallower here this is the shallower end when the water goes down it you see it much more here because it's more shallow that way if you can see my jeep way back there it's where it was in the 70s so now as i turn around toward the water i can't even see the water it's like a freaking mile if you didn't think salton sea was drying up i've actually seen comments on some of my salton sea videos saying oh it looks fine to me you're either blind or stupid i'm still my brain is kind of trying to wrap around how far down the water's going now they're doing a reclamation project here the red hill reclamation project they're going to turn all this into wetlands i thought for a minute that might be why the water level was so down maybe they blocked it off but they can't because this was this wasn't a inlet or anything like that this is just the open end of salton sea we're at the navy base now technically naval station i got to point that out because it upsets a lot of people if i say it wrong this is one of my favorite places i've been here a dozen times or more and because i've been here so many times i know exactly what the water levels are where they were there's lots of landmarks so you can see where the water is and compared to where it was from the last time i was here from the 1940s until the 1980s this was all underwater this was a pier 2014 and 15 the last time i was here the water level was right here that's where the water was if you jumped off this little ledge here your feet were wet now not only can i jump off that ledge but i can walk out and i can keep walking [Music] quite a ways if you look behind me where i'm walking toward the water it's quite a ways up there if you've ever been down here before you probably recognize that big telephone pole or something that's always been at the end of the pier well now i can walk all the way out to it just a little bit past it to where the water level is not as bad as it is receded on the other side about a hundred yards from where the water level was back in 2014. these guys behind me they're working for nasa there is some instrumentation out two miles off of shore on what we call the target they've been coming out here for years to collect data and check things on it make sure it's still working make sure the haven't got out there messed it up and they just indicated to me that when they put the instrumentation on the platform it's like a pier out there two miles offshore they put it in in 2006 and from whatever they measure from the top of the ins the the deck to the water level was six feet so the water level was up six feet uh to to where the base of the uh the deck was now it's 27 feet down to the water so from 2005 6 whenever they said they put it in the water level has dropped out there two miles out 27 feet lower than what it used to be that's a big drop let's talk about some of the myths about salton sea in this area some of the myths are that they dropped atomic bombs here into salton sea that they tested atomic bombs they did test atomic weapons here as part of the manhattan project they tested the shapes they were really big and heavy and they had to make sure that when they dropped them from however many miles up that they wouldn't spin or get wobbly or whatever they use the salton sea test base codenamed sandy beach top secret at the time to drop the shapes of the bombs and then they would uh watch them and measure and see how what let's see what they did the california parachute which is the tail fins you see on a lot of big bombs today it's developed here because of the testing that they did here so it is true that they did atomic bomb related testing here back in the 1940s there's another rumor that there is that they dropped a live atomic bomb into the salton sea that's true sort of in the 1960s could be wrong something like that late 50s early 60s the air force accidentally dropped a nuclear weapon with fissionable material in it and they never found it it wasn't fused as we all know to go kablooey you have to have the fuse it takes a plutonium center and without that it nothing can happen so that wasn't in it so there's no danger of it ever exploding but there is the danger of that uranium enriched iranian whatever was in it it's not good it's out there somewhere and they never recovered it we're in salton city now i would have been here sooner but i had to save the lives of a couple of kids that got themselves stuck in the sand at the navy base [Music] so we're in salton city at johnson's landing johnson's landing was a popular place not too long ago and we're at the marina at johnson's landing so if you ever put out your boat or anything in salton city you're probably familiar with this area so that's the marina there the the boat launch is way at the end of there and you can see it heads down towards the water which is way down past my jeep and there's a couple jeeps down there i'm about 100 yards past the end of the boat launch marina which is back there and in 2014 this is about where the water was and today water's about another 100 yards further out not as bad as it was over at red hill which is on the most shallow end of the lake so i'm now right at the at the mud line as i like to call it where if i go any further i start to sink and oh yeah it's sinking god damn it i thought i knew this shore not as well as i thought i did if you enjoyed this video thumbs down means you like the smell of rotten fish thank you for watching we hope to see on the trail

Channel: NotaRubicon Productions

Views: 136,302

Rating: 4.83424 out of 5

Keywords: is salton sea drying up, is salton sea shrinking, salton sea disaster, salton sea walk

Id: BIs5lxxxT78

Length: 19min 41sec (1181 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021