Flooding of ancient Salton Sea linked to San Andreas earthquakes

University of California - San Diego ^ | June 26, 2011 | Unknown

[decimon]

Caption: This map shows the current Salton Sea boundaries and outline of Lake Cahuilla at its peak size as well as locations of major area faults.

Credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego

Usage Restrictions: None

[decimon]

Fault on Salton ping.

[libertarian27]

I watched a documentary on the Salton Sea a year or so ago - what a funky place that is now compared to what it once was...

[celtic gal]

If you are born to drown you will never hang...

[Parley Baer]

Could be that the filling of the Salton Sea released some of the stress that was building up on a somewhat regular basis. Now that that does not happen maybe and even bigger quake will occur.

[oyez]

The Salton Sea area is subject to a lot natural and unnatural variables.

[Lazlo in PA]

Isn’t this the place that had the salinity rise through the roof?

[ThomasThomas]

True, just down the road a desert power plant fueled by cow manure is generating enough electricity to supply up to 20,000 homes.

[Larry Lucido]

So is it Salton Sea’s fault, or San Andreas’ fault? :-)

[decimon]

So is it Salton Sea’s fault, or San Andreas’ fault? :-)

I don't know, I'm still meditating on post #4.

[decimon]

Isn’t this the place that had the salinity rise through the roof?

Wikipedia: "The lake's salinity, about 44 g/L, is greater than the waters of the Pacific Ocean (35 g/L), but less than that of the Great Salt Lake; the concentration is increasing by about 1 percent annually.[1]"

[oyez]

up to 20,000 homes

And how many of those homes are occupied and subscribing to electric power?

[troy McClure]

That movie was on the documentary channel on Sunday.

It is a weird place, like it is out of a Zombie movie.

[wildehunt]

Camped there last winter for 3 days. It was the only warm place in CA that week.
It has a surreal beauty that grows on you.
The RV rocked and jiggled often from the seismic activity.

[wildehunt]

The fault scarp is plainly visible..
Great geology lesson.

[oyez]

Liberals believe that the right amount of Federal subsidy can fix all the problems. The only problem is that the area is occupied by only a few voters and most of those are Republican.

[RayChuang88]

An interesting tidbit of history: before the arrival of the Southern Pacific Railroad, that entire area was called the Salton Sink and given the very low rainfall and high summer temperatures, nobody wanted to live there. But when the railroad arrived, scientists discovered the soil along the Salton Sink near the Mexican border was very nutrient rich, and thanks to the installation of irrigation canals from the Colorado River they were able to open the land for agriculture, and renamed the southern part of the Salton Sink its modern name: Imperial Valley.

So how did the Salton Sea get created? The original Alamo Canal that provided irrigation to the Imperial Valley overflowed from torrential rains several times between 1904 and 1907, and the torrent of water effectively flooded the lowest parts of the Salton Sink, creating the Salton Sea. It wasn't until the Alamo Canal was extensively reinforced that the flooding finally stopped; engineers determined that to prevent the Salton Sea from rising excessively, it was decide to replace the Alamo Canal with today's All-American Canal further south (the new canal opened in 1942) as the irrigation source for the Imperial Valley.

[al baby]

The RV rocked and jiggled often from the seismic activity.

Ok if thats your story

[dalereed]

strip the funds from these whackos!

The Salton Sea gets flooded when there is an overabundance of water in the Colorado River and it changes course and floods.

The last time it happened was early in the last century and my father was there and there wasn’t any earthquake.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks decimon.

When its natural dimensions were in place, Lake Cahuilla and its surrounding region experienced in a 1,000-year period five earthquakes on the Southern San Andreas that are believed to have been larger than magnitude 7. The temblors occurred about 180 years apart. It's been more than 300 years since the last one... the sediments deposited over several millennia on the lake floor.. coincident... between several flooding events and rupture of step-over faults... Stress models showed that the predominantly normal faults with vertical displacement in the Salton Sea are more vulnerable to sudden increases in vertical loads caused by lake filling. Those failures may have triggered the movement of California's primary fault in several instances, the researchers said. No such sequence has taken place since the lake assumed its current dimensions.

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