California's Salton Sea Is Emitting Way More Toxic Gas Than We Thought
California's largest and most-polluted lake, the Salton Sea, is exuding hydrogen sulfide, a noxious gas, at rates that greatly exceed the state's air quality standards. Alarmingly, a new study finds that California's air quality monitoring systems may be severely underestimating how much toxic pollution is reaching people living near the lake.
Hydrogen sulfide, which smells like rotten eggs, is linked to a host of respiratory and neurological symptoms. The new study, published in the journal GeoHealth, highlights the risk the Salton Sea's emissions pose to nearby communities, many of which are predominantly Latino or Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indian.
'The communities around the Salton Sea are on the front lines of a worsening environmental health crisis,' study co-author Mara Freilich, an assistant professor at Brown University, said in a statement. 'Our study shows that hydrogen-sulfide emissions are not only more intense than previous monitoring captured, but they are systematically underreported — especially when sensors are placed away from the lake or out of alignment with prevailing winds.'
The Salton Sea is located roughly 160 miles (258 kilometers) east of Los Angeles, just east of Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. It was initially formed by accident in 1905, when the Colorado River breached its irrigation canal. It has no natural inflows or outflows and is, by state law, primarily sustained by fertilizer-and-pesticide-laden agricultural runoff. The lake has since become nothing short of an environmental catastrophe. Climate change, drought, and reduced water inflows have pushed the Salton Sea's water levels lower and lower over the past two decades, increasing the lake's production of hydrogen sulfide and kicking up toxic dust.
For the study, researchers from Brown University, UCLA, Loma Linda University, and UC Berkeley partnered with Alianza Coachella Valley, a local community organization, to examine the causes of hydrogen sulfide emissions from the lake.
To measure emissions, the researchers used data captured by South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) monitors, installed by a local agency, at three locations and placed additional sensors within the lake. The study found that between 2013 and 2024, SCAQMD sensors at all three locations consistently exceeded California's air quality standards. The readings peaked in the summer months and in August for each year from 2013 to 2024, Torres Martinez, the site closest to the lake, had an average of more than 250 hours of readings that exceeded state standards.
But even these frightening measurements were likely an underestimate, the authors wrote. An air quality sensor deployed in the lake's shallow waters detected substantially higher concentrations of hydrogen sulfide, particularly when wind was blowing over exposed sediment and shallow water. This suggests that there may be significant and overlooked sources of hydrogen sulfide blowing into nearby communities.
'Our results indicate that a significant portion of [hydrogen-sulfide] emissions remains unaccounted for, potentially being transported to communities without air monitoring stations,' the researchers wrote.
Among the many communities on the Salton Sea, only three have air quality monitoring sites.
The problem will likely get worse. Mitigation efforts for the Salton Sea have not kept up with receding water levels, the study authors wrote, leading to 'serious health impacts' in an area that already has high levels of asthma and other pulmonary ailments.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Yahoo
Hurricane forecasters will go without a key tool this season
For the past four years, a fleet of drone vessels has purposefully steered into the heart of hurricanes to gather information on a storm's wind speeds, wave heights and, critically, the complex transfer of heat and moisture between the ocean and the air right above it. These small boats from California-based company Saildrone also film harrowing footage from the ocean surface in the middle of nature's most powerful tempests—videos that are scientifically useful and have also gone viral, giving ordinary people windows into storms. Importantly, Saildrone vessels were being used by federal scientists to improve forecast and warning accuracy. But they won't be in forecasters' suite of tools this year. The company 'was unable to bid' on a contract for this season, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson Keeley Belva told CNN. The reason why concerns the timing of NOAA's solicitation for this season's contract, according to a NOAA employee speaking on condition of anonymity. NOAA sent out its request for contract proposals too late, preventing Saildrone not just from bidding, but from pre-deploying its fleet to multiple launching ports on the Atlantic and Gulf Coast in time for hurricane season. It's another example among many of the ways the Trump administration has fumbled storm preparedness and response efforts as the season begins, leading to fears of less accurate hurricane projections compared to recent years. The Saildrone news came just as NOAA was roiled by staffing cuts through firings, early retirements and other incentives used to shrink the agency. Morale has plummeted, especially in the wake of the Trump administration's budget proposal that would eliminate the entire branch of the agency that does oceanic and atmospheric research, which could wipe out hurricane research activities if enacted. Even if it isn't, the Trump administration could use other means to implement such steep cuts. Belva did not provide details when asked for specifics about the issuance date for the proposals request and the reasons for the delay given the start of hurricane season on June 1. She cited 'ongoing' discussions with Saildrone about potential future deployments with NOAA. 'NOAA continues to explore the use of other uncrewed systems in meeting the agency's data needs within hard-to-access regions of tropical cyclones during the 2025 season,' Belva added. 'The agency is preparing for the use of uncrewed surface vehicle deployments with industry partners for the 2026 season.' NOAA will still field new technologies this season to gain a better understanding of how hurricanes work and how strong individual storms are, including ultra-high altitude weather balloons, said Joe Cione, the lead meteorologist for emerging technologies at the agency's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. But all of these new tools are aerial assets, not ocean-based, as the saildrones were. With saildrones missing in action this hurricane season, meteorologists will lack continuous, direct observations of hurricanes' strongest winds near the surface of the ocean and temperatures of the warm water that fuels the storms. The agency will still use dropsondes—bundles of sensors that can measure the fierce winds as they fall through the storm after being dropped out of hurricane hunter aircraft. But they only offer a glimpse into a blip of time at a particular location in a storm, whereas the saildrones can loiter for hours or longer, providing rare observations from the lowest level of the atmosphere, said NOAA oceanographer Gregory Foltz. Saildrone observations were set to be piped directly into forecast models through newer, faster processes this year with the goal of boosting accuracy, Foltz said. In addition, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center would have been able to use saildrone data to better determine a storm's structure and intensity when issuing an advisory. The boats had another unexpected benefit: Their dizzying videos helped warn people in harm's way of a storm's ferocity, Foltz said. The videos may play a role in peoples' decisions to evacuate by showing how severe conditions are, he said. NOAA's aerial technology this season will hopefully bolster the data forecasters have to work with. During the next three weeks, NOAA's hurricane hunters will be conducting clear air tests of some of those new platforms. Cione, who focuses on identifying promising technologies for weather research and forecasting at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, touted airborne drones like the Black Swift SØ drone. It weighs just three pounds and will be deployed into storms from the belly of a NOAA WP-3 hurricane hunter aircraft. These drones can fly low in a storm for extended periods, recording winds, temperatures and other parameters in the little-sampled lowest 1,500 feet of a hurricane. 'Our situational awareness goes way up,' Cione said, when readings come back from within this layer of air. Researchers will also be using tiny, light instrument packets known as 'Streamsondes' that can be dropped from an aircraft. These fall more slowly than the standard dropsondes and therefore gather more data. This year, Cione says, researchers may work to 'swarm' Streamsondes, or drop as many as 50 of them in a matter of minutes, into an area of interest within a storm to pinpoint what a hurricane's winds and air pressure are, for example. None of these aerial platforms will provide the clear video feeds that people may have become accustomed to from the saildrones the past four years, though, nor can they reliably measure winds and sea surface temperatures for long periods of time. Ultimately, Foltz said, researchers want to get aerial and ocean-based observations at the same time for a more three-dimensional glimpse into the inner workings of nature's most powerful storms. That includes uncrewed underwater drones collecting data beneath storms, he added. 'We need everything in the atmosphere and the ocean together,' Foltz said. 'That's a big goal of ours.' That won't happen this year, but assuming NOAA's research division still exists next year, it could get closer to being realized in 2026. 'You don't know how important something is until you take it away,' Foltz said of the saildrones' data contributions.
Gizmodo
8 hours ago
- Gizmodo
NASA Satellite Captures Massive Wastewater Flow off California Coast
Turns out, NASA's spectroscopic imaging tool, EMIT, can detect water pollution. In 2022, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched a satellite sensor to map minerals in the Earth's dusty, arid regions. But that's not all it's useful for—in a new study, scientists used the spectroscopic tool to study massive amounts of sewage flowing into the sea off the Southern California coast. Every year, millions of gallons of untreated and treated wastewater are unceremoniously dumped into the Tijuana River, ferrying pollution through communities on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border before reaching the ocean. In a study published in the journal Science of the Total Environment, researchers used Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT), a hyperspectral imaging instrument aboard the International Space Station, to examine this nauseating wastewater plume at the Tijuana River delta. Pollution from wastewater isn't pretty. It can bring toxic chemicals, harmful algal blooms, and unfriendly bacteria, which can impact the health of beachgoers. People typically rely on water-quality dashboards to tell them when it's unsafe to swim, but these often rely on field samples, which don't always cover the full extent of the pollution. Collecting those samples also takes time and money, especially in heavily contaminated areas. That's where EMIT comes in. It uses imaging spectroscopy, a technique that captures both spatial and spectral information by measuring sunlight reflected off the Earth's surface. Each image can capture hundreds of wavelengths per pixel, giving scientists detailed insights into the molecular composition and material properties of what's on the ground. This allowed researchers to measure the spectral signature of the wastewater plume. The researchers compared the hyperspectral satellite images taken by EMIT with the spectra of untreated wastewater, diluted wastewater, and seawater sampled near the plume. They also compared EMIT's images with readings from a spectrometer on the ground. They found that water with high wastewater contamination emits a distinct red spectral feature that could allow researchers to monitor the extent of pollution in the future—though the source of that feature is still unclear. The researchers hope that the data can complement efforts to sample water quality near the river's mouth by telling water scientists where to sample. 'From orbit you are able to look down and see that a wastewater plume is extending into places you haven't sampled,' study coauthor Christine Lee, a scientist at JPL in Southern California, said in a statement. 'It's like a diagnostic at the doctor's office that tells you, 'Hey, let's take a closer look at this.'' EMIT has also proven useful for detecting emissions of methane and carbon dioxide from gas leaks, assessing forest health, and estimating snowpack melting rates. Now, EMIT has yet another job. 'The fact that EMIT's findings over the coast are consistent with measurements in the field is compelling to water scientists,' Eva Scrivner, a doctoral student at the University of Connecticut and the study's lead author, said in a statement. 'It's really exciting.'
CNN
8 hours ago
- CNN
Hurricane forecasters will go without a key tool this season
Hurricanes Storms Federal agenciesFacebookTweetLink Follow For the past four years, a fleet of drone vessels has purposefully steered into the heart of hurricanes to gather information on a storm's wind speeds, wave heights and, critically, the complex transfer of heat and moisture between the ocean and the air right above it. These small boats from California-based company Saildrone also film harrowing footage from the ocean surface in the middle of nature's most powerful tempests—videos that are scientifically useful and have also gone viral, giving ordinary people windows into storms. Importantly, Saildrone vessels were being used by federal scientists to improve forecast and warning accuracy. But they won't be in forecasters' suite of tools this year. The company 'was unable to bid' on a contract for this season, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesperson Keeley Belva told CNN. The reason why concerns the timing of NOAA's solicitation for this season's contract, according to a NOAA employee speaking on condition of anonymity. NOAA sent out its request for contract proposals too late, preventing Saildrone not just from bidding, but from pre-deploying its fleet to multiple launching ports on the Atlantic and Gulf Coast in time for hurricane season. It's another example among many of the ways the Trump administration has fumbled storm preparedness and response efforts as the season begins, leading to fears of less accurate hurricane projections compared to recent years. The Saildrone news came just as NOAA was roiled by staffing cuts through firings, early retirements and other incentives used to shrink the agency. Morale has plummeted, especially in the wake of the Trump administration's budget proposal that would eliminate the entire branch of the agency that does oceanic and atmospheric research, which could wipe out hurricane research activities if enacted. Even if it isn't, the Trump administration could use other means to implement such steep cuts. Belva did not provide details when asked for specifics about the issuance date for the proposals request and the reasons for the delay given the start of hurricane season on June 1. She cited 'ongoing' discussions with Saildrone about potential future deployments with NOAA. 'NOAA continues to explore the use of other uncrewed systems in meeting the agency's data needs within hard-to-access regions of tropical cyclones during the 2025 season,' Belva added. 'The agency is preparing for the use of uncrewed surface vehicle deployments with industry partners for the 2026 season.' NOAA will still field new technologies this season to gain a better understanding of how hurricanes work and how strong individual storms are, including ultra-high altitude weather balloons, said Joe Cione, the lead meteorologist for emerging technologies at the agency's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory. But all of these new tools are aerial assets, not ocean-based, as the saildrones were. With saildrones missing in action this hurricane season, meteorologists will lack continuous, direct observations of hurricanes' strongest winds near the surface of the ocean and temperatures of the warm water that fuels the storms. The agency will still use dropsondes—bundles of sensors that can measure the fierce winds as they fall through the storm after being dropped out of hurricane hunter aircraft. But they only offer a glimpse into a blip of time at a particular location in a storm, whereas the saildrones can loiter for hours or longer, providing rare observations from the lowest level of the atmosphere, said NOAA oceanographer Gregory Foltz. Saildrone observations were set to be piped directly into forecast models through newer, faster processes this year with the goal of boosting accuracy, Foltz said. In addition, forecasters at the National Hurricane Center would have been able to use saildrone data to better determine a storm's structure and intensity when issuing an advisory. The boats had another unexpected benefit: Their dizzying videos helped warn people in harm's way of a storm's ferocity, Foltz said. The videos may play a role in peoples' decisions to evacuate by showing how severe conditions are, he said. NOAA's aerial technology this season will hopefully bolster the data forecasters have to work with. During the next three weeks, NOAA's hurricane hunters will be conducting clear air tests of some of those new platforms. Cione, who focuses on identifying promising technologies for weather research and forecasting at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, touted airborne drones like the Black Swift SØ drone. It weighs just three pounds and will be deployed into storms from the belly of a NOAA WP-3 hurricane hunter aircraft. These drones can fly low in a storm for extended periods, recording winds, temperatures and other parameters in the little-sampled lowest 1,500 feet of a hurricane. 'Our situational awareness goes way up,' Cione said, when readings come back from within this layer of air. Researchers will also be using tiny, light instrument packets known as 'Streamsondes' that can be dropped from an aircraft. These fall more slowly than the standard dropsondes and therefore gather more data. This year, Cione says, researchers may work to 'swarm' Streamsondes, or drop as many as 50 of them in a matter of minutes, into an area of interest within a storm to pinpoint what a hurricane's winds and air pressure are, for example. None of these aerial platforms will provide the clear video feeds that people may have become accustomed to from the saildrones the past four years, though, nor can they reliably measure winds and sea surface temperatures for long periods of time. Ultimately, Foltz said, researchers want to get aerial and ocean-based observations at the same time for a more three-dimensional glimpse into the inner workings of nature's most powerful storms. That includes uncrewed underwater drones collecting data beneath storms, he added. 'We need everything in the atmosphere and the ocean together,' Foltz said. 'That's a big goal of ours.' That won't happen this year, but assuming NOAA's research division still exists next year, it could get closer to being realized in 2026. 'You don't know how important something is until you take it away,' Foltz said of the saildrones' data contributions.
