Exposing the Desert Series – storymaps.arcgis.com/
The Salton Sea is ecologically a part of the Colorado River watershed which comprises parts of southwestern US and northern Mexico (Vélez-Ibáñez and Heyman 2017). In an effort to colonize the southwest in the 19th century, the US Bureau of Land Reclamation and private investors sought to control the Colorado River watershed (Reisner 1986). From 1905-1907 the Salton Sea was formed when flood waters broke an irrigation canal constructed by the California Development Company. After the flood waters were controlled, the Sea was kept in order to maintain farming in the area and is officially designated as a sump, a dump for agroindustrial pollutants (De Buys 1999; Rudy 2005; Cantor and Knuth 2019).