Transcript

Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW

From Stuff You Should Know · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 48 min · 8,881 words · 173 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW", an episode of Stuff You Should Know published November 12, 2025 (48 min, about 8,881 words). It mentions 28 people, works and ideas, including Salt and Sea, Sultan Sea, Chuck Bryant, Josh Malcolm Clark, Colorado River.

What this episode is about

The Salton Sea, located in Southern California, is an ecological disaster resulting from human intervention, primarily due to agricultural runoff and mismanagement of water resources. This inland lake, often inaccurately referred to as a "sea," faces severe environmental challenges, impacting local wildlife and communities, and highlights the critical need for sustainable water management practices.

Key takeaways

  • Salt and Sea: more like salt and disaster—human intervention turned a vibrant lake into an ecological mess.
  • California’s Sultan Sea raises eyebrows: it’s lush in name but a desert of ecological failure.
  • Ghost towns around the Salt and Sea remind us—the allure of urban development can ebb away, just like water.
  • Inland seas don't have to be oceans; sometimes they just need a dramatic name to drown the reality.
  • Silt and salt: the Sultan Sea's ecological woes highlight how nature's cycles can become human-made catastrophes.

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 5:00: Sultan Sea, Salt and Sea, Colorado River, ecological disaster
  2. – 10:00: Colorado River, Sultan Sea, Imperial Canal, Lake Lake Cahuila
  3. – 15:00: Salt and Sea, Big Macs, Sultan Sea, Southern Pacific Railroad
  4. – 20:00: Sultan Sea, Salt and Sea, California Riviera, US Fish and Wildlife Service
  5. – 25:00: Salt and Sea, Sultan Sea, utrofification
  6. – 30:00: Salt and Sea, Sultan Sea, Chuck Bryant
  7. – 35:00: Salt and Sea, Sultan Sea, quantification settlement agreement, Colorado River
  8. – 40:00: Salt and Sea, California Riviera, DDT
  9. – 45:00: Salt and Sea, lithium, Sultan Sea, Josh Malcolm Clark

Notable quotes from "Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"

  • And the reason that they would have pamphlets that say don't come here is because the salt and sea is a genuine ecological disaster.
    about Salt and Sea · at
  • Flow out to the Gulf of California and then it would happen again a couple centuries later. And the thing that made it happen was the Colorado River which flows to the east…
    about Colorado River · at
  • The original canal. The problem was because they thought it was going to be temporary, they didn't install the proper headgates. Headgates control the flow of water in a canal.
    about Imperial Canal · at
  • Salty. and today I saw anywhere between onethird or 50% more salty than the Pacific Ocean, the Sultan Sea has become because of all that introduction.
    about Sultan Sea · at
  • Yeah, it's a it's called utrification.
    about utrofification · at
  • Okay, Chuck. So, the Sultan Sea has really gone downhill. There's no denying it. People have decamped from there. Not just vacationers, but people who live there, too. Just moved away because it's.
    about Chuck Bryant · at
  • Signed off there was this deal that they had been negotiating for years called the quantification settlement agreement or QSA. And basically what they were trying to get done…
    about quantification settlement agreement · at
  • And they're starting to restore wetlands and it actually looks like it's going to not be quite the ecological disaster that it would have been had California just sat on its…
    about ecological disaster · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Chuck Bryant — Person · Co-host · 1 mention · first at
    Chuck Bryant co-hosts, adds details and reactions, and discusses environmental mechanisms like eutrophication and fish kills.
  • Josh Malcolm Clark — Person · Host · 1 mention · first at
    Josh Clark co-hosts the episode, narrating the history, policy, and health impacts of the Salton Sea and guiding the discussion.
    Okay, Chuck. So, the Sultan Sea has really gone downhill. There's no denying it. People have decamped from there. Not just vacationers, but people who live there, too. Just moved away because it's.
  • Bill Johnson — Person · Referenced researcher · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as a PhD researcher studying children's respiratory health near the Salton Sea, supporting the episode’s health-risk claims.
    Uptick in asthma. there's a doctor named Jill Johnson, a PhD who's an assistant professor of preventative medicine at Southern Cal and she's working on a research project…
  • Shore Farzan — Person · Referenced researcher · 1 mention · first at
    Named as a research partner on the children’s health project near the Salton Sea.
    Health Colon assessing Imperial Valley respiratory health and environment in the environment along with partner Shore Farzan another PhD and they're basically following…
  • Ben Hackett — Person · Referenced colleague / recommended artist · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned during listener mail as a show producer and musician; his album is recommended to listeners.
    Stuff You Should Know, our colleague. he is a producer along with Jerry. and Ben is a musician, Ben Hackett, and he put out a great piece of art. he put out a record called Songs for Sleeping Dogs not too long ago. And Ben's awesome.
  • Val Kilmer — Person · Pop-culture reference · 1 mention · first at
    Referenced as starring in a film titled 'Salton Sea,' used to underscore the area’s notoriety and 'methy' reputation.
    Too. it's just a good all-around topic if you ask me. Plus it was a SOS so movie starring Val Kilmer back in the either late 90s or early 2000s.

Books & papers

  • American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine — Book · Referenced publication venue · 1 mention
    Named as the journal where findings about Salton Sea-related respiratory impacts (asthma) were published.
    Published an article... in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine.
  • Songs for Sleeping Dogs — Book · Recommended work (music release mis-typed as book) · 1 mention · first at
    Josh recommends Ben Hackett's record 'Songs for Sleeping Dogs' to listeners during listener mail.
    And Ben is a musician, Ben Hackett, and he put out a great piece of art. he put out a record called Songs for Sleeping Dogs not too long ago. And Ben's awesome. Songs for Sleeping Dogs is great. It's this very viby instrumental. I think.

Companies & orgs

  • US Fish and Wildlife Service — Company · Referenced government agency · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as creating a wildlife refuge at the Salton Sea, underscoring its importance on the Pacific Flyway and for habitat protection.
    You have a sort of a brand new wildlife refuge forming such that the US Fish and Wildlife Service even created the Salt and Sea Wildlife Refuge to protect all the stuff that was there now.
  • Southern Pacific Railroad — Company · Historical actor · 1 mention · first at
    Referenced as getting involved in efforts to redirect/seal the Colorado River breach that created the Salton Sea.
    Pretty expensive proposition. It was a pretty frantic thing. The US government got involved. the Southern Pacific Railroad got involved. They fully sealed it in 1907, but…
  • Union Pacific Railroad — Company · Historical actor · 1 mention · first at
    Credited with building infrastructure (trestle/dam materials) to seal the breach threatening rail lines, helping end the uncontrolled diversion.
    On who's podcasting many years from now, right? Yeah. The way that they sealed it, the Union Pacific Railroad because their lines were threatened, they're We better do…

Products & tech

  • Big Macs — Product · Comedic measurement reference · 3 mentions · first at
    Used as a humorous unit conversion to illustrate the massive flow rate into the Salton Sea and later as a metaphor for decay.
    It is exactly 2,295,918 Big Macs all flowing into this salt and sea per second.

Concepts & topics

  • Salt and Sea — Concept · Core topic · 28 mentions · first at
    The episode explains the origin, boom-and-bust development, and ongoing environmental and public-health crisis of the Salton Sea (referred to repeatedly as 'salt and sea').
  • Sultan Sea — Concept · Core topic (alternate name/wordplay) · 17 mentions · first at
    Used throughout as the (mis)name for the Salton Sea; the hosts repeatedly debate 'sea vs lake' and use it as the anchor for the episode’s narrative.
  • Colorado River — Concept · Causal driver · 6 mentions · first at
    The river’s flooding and diversion (via canal failure/bypass) created the modern Salton Sea and later water allocations reduced inflows, accelerating shrinkage.
  • quantification settlement agreement — Concept · Policy mechanism · 2 mentions · first at
    Explained as a 2003 water-allocation deal that reduced agricultural runoff sustaining the Salton Sea, accelerating its shrinkage while funding efficiency upgrades.
  • ecological disaster — Concept · Central characterization · 2 mentions · first at
    The hosts repeatedly frame the Salton Sea as a human-caused ecological disaster, summarizing the episode’s environmental thesis.
  • Imperial Canal — Concept · Key infrastructure cause · 2 mentions · first at
    The canal and its silt-clogging/bypass failure are central to how the Colorado River was diverted and the Salton Sea formed.
  • utrofification — Concept · Key mechanism · 1 mention · first at
    Used to explain algae blooms, oxygen depletion, dead zones, and cascading fish/bird die-offs in the Salton Sea.
  • lithium — Concept · Future economic/industrial angle · 3 mentions · first at
    Discussed as a valuable resource near the Salton Sea, creating tension between economic development and environmental restoration.
    And there's a push and pull over whether to lithium mine there. And of course, they're going to end up lithium mining there because it's just so valuable. but some people are like,.
  • California Riviera — Concept · Historical development framing · 2 mentions · first at
    Describes the mid-century tourism boom branding of the Salton Sea as a resort destination before ecological decline.
    People because people want to go see those flamingos. So, by the 1950s, developers had come along and turned it into what they called the California Riviera or the Sultan…
  • DDT — Concept · Toxic contaminant example · 1 mention · first at
    Named as one of the pollutants found in the Salton Sea sediments/dust, contributing to health concerns as the lakebed dries.
    In little kids. There's all sorts of other stuff to worry about, too, because there's metals, pesticides, DDTs been found in there. There's just so much crud in there that now…
  • Lake Lake Cahuila — Concept · Historical precursor · 1 mention · first at
    Presented as a much larger prehistoric lake in the same basin, illustrating the region’s cyclical lake/sea history.
    Lake Cahuila, which formed about 1300 years ago as well as geologists can tell. And it stuck around for hundreds of years, possibly up into the 1500s. And at one.
  • geothermal electricity plant — Concept · Proposed solution/economic development · 1 mention · first at
    Discussed as a potential investment leveraging geothermal hotspots near Mullet Island to generate power and possibly fund regional activity.
    Means there's some hot spots there. And so, some people are saying, Hey, let's let's put a few billion dollars toward a geothermal electricity plant.

Places & events

  • Mullet Island — Place · Referenced landmark · 2 mentions · first at
    An island in the Salton Sea described as atop a dormant volcano; later tied to geothermal potential.
    Hey, we can like we've got this great land there that we can make money off still. remember that Mullet Island that's on the dormant volcano? that means there's some hot spots…
  • Slab City — Place · Referenced nearby cultural site · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as an artist/alternative community area near the Salton Sea, contributing to the region’s 'weird, decrepit art place' identity.
    Not a beach, right? there's also it's attracted a lot of artists too like Slab City is essentially a taken over military installation. there's a folk art installation called Salvation Mountain.
  • Salvation Mountain — Place · Referenced art installation · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as a folk art installation in the Salton Sea region, illustrating the area’s cultural afterlife post-tourism.
    Lot of artists too like Slab City is essentially a taken over military installation. there's a folk art installation called Salvation Mountain.
  • East Jesus — Place · Referenced art site · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned as an outdoor gallery near Slab City, reinforcing the region’s attraction for artists and explorers.
    There's another whole like outdoor gallery called East Jesus I believe is what it's called. So, there's a lot of art that's being made there. that's kind of turning it into a.

Full transcript with timestamps

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here, too. And this is Stuff You Should Know. It's a little bit of a jazzy Earth Science edition, I think.

Yeah. And I mean, we might as well get into it cuz I just told Jerry the name of this was Saltton Lake. Mhm.

And even though it's called the Sultan Sea, right? Uh which is a it's an inland lake in Imperial in the Coachella valleys in Riverside and Imperial County in California, Southern California. But and I said it's not really a sea and you said it's an endless sea. Then you said save it.

I said this is gold. I didn't say save it like that. Well, no. I mean, I'm not going to do my Josh impression. You just did a really mean Josh impression. Save it.

Uh, no, no, no. Uh, so I guess we need to determine this. Why do they call it a sea?

I mean, it's an inland sea. I don't know. I just know that most people call it that. I failed to go look up whether it is a sea or a lake.

I mean, I don't think it has any outlet to the ocean anymore, right? No, not anymore. We're going to talk about that.

Well, that makes it a lake. Save it. I think that's See, I nailed it. I think that's the difference between a sea and a lake. I think a lake has no outlet to the to the ocean, and a sea does.

Oh, good point. If I'm not mistaken, I might be wrong about that. I didn't look it up, but

I think California has a lot of work to do. They need to go rewrite all their pamphlets and update their websites and all that stuff. It's now the Sultan Lake.

Well, now all their pamphlets just say, "Don't even bother coming here." Right.

To the Sultan Sea. That is, not California. I love California. Exactly. Uh and the reason that they would have pamphlets that say don't come here is because the salt and sea is a genuine ecological disaster.

Yeah. Human made it every step of the way. And uh it's got a really interesting history too. Um it's just a good all-around topic if you ask me. Plus it was a SOS so movie starring Val Kilmer back in the either late 90s or early 2000s.

I think it was early 2000s. It was okay. I saw it. the the extra supporting character was meth.

Yeah, it was very methy. Uh yeah, I I've been here by the way. I was wondering that.

Yeah, on on my big out west trip many years ago after college where I spent several months driving around with my best friend Brett.

Mhm. Uh we went through the salt and sea and um it wasn't great back then. Imagine it's it's well it sounds like it's even worse now, but uh when did we talk about this before? Was it dessertification?

Oh, maybe because I know we've talked about it. It that doesn't ring a bell, but I mean so much so that I was convinced we did a whole episode, but it it could have been one of our illconceived videos that we used to do.

That's possible, too, because I think I could see us taking the angle that there were ghost towns there.

Oh, okay. You know, ghost towns. There are there's a lot of ghost towns there. As we'll see, the area was once quite developed and uh for good reasons. Again, as we'll see, people largely abandoned this area, but let's let's talk about how the Sultan Sea even came to be because that is a interesting story in and of itself.

Yeah, it totally is. Uh it's in the Sultan basin, and that's s a l t o n by the way,

right? And that is a a very large uh trough uh just sort of a natural geological trough that that led into at one point the Gulf of California, but it was it was there were other seas before this sea or lakes if you want to go that route.

Yeah. From the oldest I saw is that we have geological evidence of inland seas or lakes depending on your definition um going back at least 40,000 years and that it was almost cyclical. There'd be a a lake that was there for a few hundred years and it would dry up or flow out to the Gulf of California and then it would happen again a couple centuries later. And the thing that made it happen was the Colorado River which flows to the east along the border of California and Nevada and California and Arizona down into uh I guess the Gulf of California right?

You asking me? I think so. So that would make the Colorado River a sea, but it flows into there and every once in a while there's a lot of snow melt. There's a lot of rain and the Colorado River will flood its banks so much that it a bunch of it gets diverted into the Sultan basin forming one of the Sultan seas over time.

Yeah. For a while, like you said, you know, it it could be there for a while. Eventually, it's out in the middle of the desert, so eventually it's going to evaporate,

right? But as the river flowed in there, it carried a lot of silt with it. Uh, and eventually that silt gummed up the outlet so it couldn't get anywhere. So there was a natural dam that was formed.

Right. And you know, it was like you said, it was uh it was a lake for a long time. Sometimes it was a saltwater lake. Sometimes the heat would dry it out and evaporate it and it would just become a dry bed once again. Uh and it just it was this kind of weird uh geological cycle. I don't I mean I'm sure this has happened elsewhere, but this seems particularly noteworthy for this area.

It does. It seems kind of unique, you know. Yeah, I think so. Uh it uh there's also one of these lakes or seas. You'll like this one because they call it a lake.

Lake Lake Cahuila, which formed about 1300 years ago as as well as geologists can tell. And it stuck around for hundreds of years, possibly up into the 1500s. And at one point in the 1500s, it flooded. So it was already there, and it grew to about 26 times the size of the Sultan Sea.

Oh wow. Which in and of itself, that sounds pretty impressive. But I came up with a few comparisons for some of our listeners around the world, if I may.

Sure. For our northern listeners, that is larger than the size of Lake Erie. Okay. For our Canadian listeners, it's four times larger than the capital city of Ottawa. Uh for our European listeners, that's larger than Belgium.

Okay. In the UK, that's bigger than Wales. Mhm. In Australia, that's two times the greater Sydney metro area. And for our friends in California, that's 26 times the size of the Sultan Sea.

Wow. You did your homework. I did. Is there a program that you use like just like joshcon converts.com

there? There are uh yeah, I make like $12 a month on web ads. That's great. Uh no, there's there's websites that says like they're called like the size of or something like that. So usually just type in what's the size of 10,000 square miles, which is what that would be.

Is a landing page just a banana? Yes. It starts from there. Yeah. Where did that come from? I'm using a banana for scale. Do you know?

Oh, I don't know. I never I mean, who starts any of these things? Okay. I didn't know if it was something that you had kind of brought up or something because I know this stuff you should know. Army is crazy for that.

No, it's just an internet thing, you know. Okay. Ron Ron's doing all of that stuff.

Yeah, good old Ron. He comes up with the best memes. Uh, all right. So, that was the the cycle for thousands of years depositing that silt. Uh, one of the byproducts of that is it made that soil very, uh, rich and and stuff could really grow on it, uh, if it rained ever, uh, which it doesn't. So, that was a problem and irrigation's going to solve that problem. So, in the early 1900s, uh, the Imperial Canal was built to say, "Hey, let's divert some of that Colorado River toward us, uh, so we can have drinking water and so we can irrigate this rich rich, um, soil that lies beneath our feet." Mhm.

And they completed it and you know it was uh pretty good. But that same silt is going to keep clogging up even you know kind of any moving body of water and that eventually happened to the canal like in a bad way not too long after they opened it.

No, just in a couple of years. Um and this one clog was so bad that they were like we're not going to get rid of this anytime soon. So they dug a bypass around it, you know.

Yeah. Which makes sense. It's smart. and they just expected it to last like a couple of months until they cleaned that that silt deposit out and could go back to the original canal. The problem was because they thought it was going to be temporary, they didn't install the proper headgates. Headgates control the flow of water in a canal.

So that means that the water in that bypass was literally out of control, which was fine. They dug it well enough that um under normal circumstances the water was flowing normally. But the year after they dug that bypass they they it stayed around longer than expected and the year after there were some genuinely abnormal circumstances that caused a huge problem for everybody.

Yeah, it rained a lot. Uh a big rainy season and then you know snow melt in the Rockies can always be a problem if it was extra and that year it was extra coinciding with those rains. the Colorado River uh swoll up again and it, you know, did what water does. It it goes down river in a in a pretty impactful way and really overwhelmed that temporary channel that they were using to divert around the clog canal.

Yeah. Uh it carved it. It just made it bigger and deeper and eventually it started overflowing into that salt and sink and just became one big body of water.

Yeah. So essentially, the Colorado River decided, I'll go this way instead. So it actually changed its course from the way that it had been going for millennia to this way directly into the salt and sea. And it started flowing so fast that 90,000 cubic feet of water per second was flowing into the salt and sea. Right. That is the size of an Olympicsiz pool that much water flowing in every second.

Yeah. And for our friends in the north, that's an Olympic sized pool, right? Yeah. I'm not going to keep going.

Well, what about our friends who like McDonald's? Oh, I mean, if you did a Big Mac conversion, that's really going the extra mile.

It is exactly 2,295,918 Big Macs all flowing into this salt and sea per second.

So delicious. It does seem delicious, but imagine them all kind of flowing at once and smacking into one another. It probably get kind of gross.

Yeah, pretty gross. So, I mean, that happened for a couple of years and they tried to redirect the river. It was a pretty uh expensive proposition. It was a pretty frantic thing. The US government got involved. Uh the Southern Pacific Railroad got involved. They fully sealed it in 1907, but that's like what, three years later. And you know, by that point, it was too late. They're like, "All right, now we got a 400 square mile inland sea or lake depending on who's podcasting many years from now,

right?" Yeah. The way that they sealed it, the Union Pacific Railroad because their lines were threatened, they're like, "We better do something because these government yokals have no idea what to do." And so apparently it took two they built a trestle across the river to install a dam made of 257 carloads of rock, 221 carloads of gravel, and 203 carloads of clay all dumped into one spot to finally fill that breach. That's what it took. That's how big of a breach it was.

How many Big Macs? A lot. I didn't do that one. Sorry. It's okay. Uh, is should we take a break now or is that a should we? It seems like a good time for a break.

Yeah, the salt and sea is now there. The breach has been sealed and people are saying, "What the heck are we going to do with this?"

Yeah, we're going to water ski eventually. So, uh, we'll come back and talk about that right after this. learning stuff from Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia. How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, reporter. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's stop.

All right. So when we last left you, uh, human experimentation and sort of error and rain and snow melt caused a 400 square mile, uh, almost 35 mile long and 15 mile wide, about 30 foot deep on average lake to form in the middle of the California desert. Yeah. Um it because it's where it was eventually if humankind had not intruded once again it probably would have eventually just completely evaporate like it had been doing for millennia.

Mhm. Uh but like we mentioned that soil is good stuff. So they started to to build you know farmland out there and and irrigate that land. And what do you what do you do when you irrigate stuff? You got to have runoff. And so they're running this irrigation uh water off into the lake, which basically it's like, hey, we're we're putting at least as much water as you're evaporating. So you're not going anywhere.

No. Yeah, that's right. So it stabilized the lake indefinitely, just the agricultural runoff. Um, one of the other things that the other impacts that this had because they started doing that in the 20s is that agricultural runoff is chalk full of salt, which I didn't realize, but this irrigation produces a lot of salt and that stuff was flowing right into the salt and it turned it salty. Um, and today I saw anywhere between onethird or 50% more salty than the Pacific Ocean, the Sultan Sea has become because of all that introduction.

So, it started freshwater and then because of agricultural runoff, it turned into a saltwater inland sea/lake.

That's right. Uh and because it's located along the Pacific Flyway, which is a great migratory uh bird route, uh the birds were like, "Hey, this is great. Now there's water here." Uh the locals were like, "We should put some fish in here." So, they stocked it with tilapia, a lot of tilapia,

and sport fish for sport fishing. And of course, that the birds love that even more. So all of a sudden by the 1930s uh you have a a sort of a brand new wildlife refuge forming uh such that the US Fish and Wildlife Service even created the Salt and Sea Wildlife Refuge to protect all the the stuff that was there now.

Yeah. So when the Sultan Sea first formed everybody's like this is actually kind of great. This is a mistake that turned really wonderful for everybody. We we we turned river water into lemonade in other words.

That's right. So, there are some other weird things that didn't make it, but that were introduced um flamingos, which I guess aren't that weird. But, uh a guy introduced sea lions, too, um at one point, and they were accused of stealing pigs in the area,

but the guy who introduced sea lions and flamingos, he had a legendary restaurant out on um an island in the middle of the Sultan Sea called Mullet Island, which is actually just sitting at top a dormant volcano. It's very important to remember this for later. It's a dormant but not extinct volcano. It's just kind of sitting there chilling, waiting to go up.

That's right. Uh and you know, once you have uh flamingos, you're going to have people because people want to go see those flamingos. So, by the 1950s, uh developers had come along and turned it into what they called the California Riviera or the Sultan Riviera or Palm Springs by the Sea. And it's exactly what you think. It's tiki bars. It's restaurants. had a very Palm Springsy vibe.

Uh like you know Elvis performed there, Frank Sinatra performed there. Uh they had you know I wasn't kidding about the water skiing. Um they people yachted, people swam. It was just a big recreation area uh out there in the middle of a desert in, you know, Southern California. They they were like, "Yeah, we we'll take another one of these. We got plenty of people around."

Right. And Palm Springs gets a little crowded. So now we have this this beautiful inland sea lake.

Yeah. People started building vacation homes there. Uh there were very famous speedboat races that were held there every year. Uh at one point some developers sunk $2 million in 1960 money. Yeah.

Into uh building the Northshore Beach and Yacht Club which became basically the crown jewel of the Sultan Sea area.

Um there were postcards that said greetings from the Sultan Sea. There was a Bombay Beach resident whose

Wait, they had postcards? They had postcards. Swear to God. Did they sell shot glasses?

I Yes, there was. There was a Spencer's Gifts on on the Sultan Sea in the 60s. All right.

Um, you could also get a and Grateful Dead poster and a Latoya Jackson and lingerie poster.

Right. Is she in a Is she in a Lambo? Uh, right. No, that's Garfield. Okay. Um, so there was this Bombay Beach resident, uh, which is one of the little party towns on the Sultan Sea who and it's still there. There's something like 350 people that live there. But he said back in the day it was like a spring break party all the time. Uh the problem was the salt and sea. As much fun as people were having on it, it was this ticking environmental time bomb just growing underneath their water skis essentially day by day until finally in around the 70s it became clear that the salt and seas glitz was starting to wear off and there was rotten Big Macs underneath. Do you know I thought you were going to lead in with when you said the problem is I thought you were going to say is that spring break is not meant to last forever.

Oh, that's a great one. Yeah, let's go back and edit that in. Just just a note.

Okay. Well, we there'll be no context. You'll just add it in and then we'll leave the part where you suggested in too.

I agree. Uh yeah. So, yeah, things will go downhill pretty quickly. Uh, you know, I hope we've hammered home enough that this thing just sort of appeared because of people and it's out in the middle of a desert and it's not it wasn't supposed to be there really. So, obviously it's not going to rain. Um, so that's not going to fill that thing back up. They had that agricultural runoff for many years, but as we'll see, that would end up being a big part of the problem.

Yeah. Um, developments would flood, uh, you know, because they were building, you know, lakeside properties and stuff like that. So, uh, you know, it whenever you try to intrude, I feel like, and build a big natural thing out where there probably wasn't supposed to be one, I feel like it usually goes south like this in some way.

Yeah, it's hubris. Yeah. So, yeah, that the runoff would sometimes flood the lake. There would be so much of it and those developments would flood like you were saying. The other problem with the runoff is that it not just salt, it brings lots of pesticides and fertilizers with it. And remember that there was no outlet for this lake which made it a lake in the first place. So all of this toxic water didn't have anywhere to go, right? It just stayed in the lake.

Yeah. And anytime you have a lot of um fertilizers introduced into a body of water, especially a warm one, you get algae blooms. You also get bacteria blooms. And when the algae decays,

the microbes that eat it also suck up a lot of the oxygen in the water. and that kills off all the stuff that needs that oxygen. So, it creates dead zones. And then even worse, that bacteria that blooms, um, some kinds of it actually produce toxins that can do things like damage humans livers or their DNA or cause respiratory failure. So, all this stuff is starting to like happen in the salt and sea starting in the 70s and 80s. Um, and it's it's just becoming clear that there's problems that are starting to brew, like literally brewing within the salt and sea.

Yeah, it's a it's called utrification. And there are some pretty staggering and very sad statistics that we're going to kind of run through here as far as the die off because uh, you know, the fish die off and then eventually because of the fish die off, the bird die off was really massive. Um, this one is is fairly staggering. Just over a five-month period from December 91 to April 92, 150,000 uh little small water birds are called what are those? Eared Grebs.

Yeah. Is that what is that how we're pronouncing that? I was going to say Grebies, but I think you nailed it.

I'm not really sure, but they're little small water birds and 150,000 of them died over five months on the Sultan Sea. another 20,000 uh in ' 94. Um 10,000 white and brown pelicans uh died out in 1996. Uh about 10,000 other fish eating birds. And this is the really sad one even though it was I say only a thousand, that's a lot. But they were endangered brown pelicans and apparently that was the largest sort of single die off of an endangered species to ever happen.

Yeah. Yeah. And all this is going down on the salt and sea or the tilapia man. How about that stat?

Yeah. The most eyepopping stat that I've found is that 8 million 8 million tilapia died in one single day in August of 1999.

How do they figure that? You know, I don't know. They must have counted one in like a square foot and then multiplied it by a Big Mac or something.

Yeah. But well, in this case, fish tacos maybe. Gross. That was probably insensitive.

What? Fish tacos? Oh, I mean tilapia is good for I don't eat tilapia much, but it's pretty good for a fish taco.

Aren't they the rats of the sea? Yeah, I think so. That I used to eat it more. I'll eat tilapia. I'm not that fancy.

Oh. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'll eat tilapia right in front of you. Uh, well, I I'll be dining on my Chilean sea bass.

Nice. Or what was that called? It was a something toothfish, right? Didn't they re

Patagonian fish? I forgot. Yeah, Patagonian. That's the real name for sea bass.

That's right, suckers. So, yes. Again, I think it's worth restating. 8 million tilapia died in a single day in 1999. The previous record before that had been set the summer prior, and that was 500,000 that died on a single day. So, clearly things are getting worse by the year uh at the Sultan Sea by the time the '9s roll around.

Yeah. And so I mean they were running incinerators around the clock uh around town because you know the the smell of fish carcass was everywhere and you had all these very sadly all these animal bodies all over the place.

I guess you could call them carcasses but I'm going to say bodies. So there's another there's an explanation for this too and it's actually pretty simple. In addition to those um the utrofication dead zones that are produced by those algae blooms, just simple summertime heat in a really saline body of water can kill fish on mass. And that's exactly what was going on as the salt and sea warmed as summer started to kind of get going and there's like 105 degree August temperatures. Um, hot water, warm water carries less oxygen than cooler water and salt water carries less oxygen than fresh water.

So, when you have warm, briny water, fish can suffocate and that's what was happening. And so, fish die offs are just an annual part of life um around the salt and sea.

Yeah. And I mean, not only that, it's just losing surface area. It's shrinking. So, 10% uh has been lost in recent years. They're projecting 40% by 2030. And when that's happening in a really salty area, uh, and all those pesticides and metals and everything that have been, you know, deposited over the years due to the agriculture all around, uh, it just makes it more concentrated and it's just,

you know, it's a bad scene. It's getting just saltier over the years. It's getting more, you know, chalk full of more densely packed pesticides and things. And they're saying that the salinity is probably going to increase another maybe three times in the next 10 years. Basically kind of taking care of anything else that might still be living there,

right? Um and just from the fact that it's shrinking too. Um I saw that there's houses that were built along the shoreline back in the heyday that are now like a football field away from the the shoreline now. That's how much it shrunk. and they expect it's going to shrink another 40% by 2030. So things are getting dire here, right? And you can kind of imagine that as things started to to go downhill, tourism dropped off. That happened exactly as you'd think. That Northshore Beach and Yacht Club that was the crown jewel, it closed down in 1984 uh because there was a flood from agricultural runoff. And then I saw a really cool, eerie picture, Chuck.

There's a drive-in movie theater again from back in the day. It's in Bombay Beach. And for some reason, the cars are all parked. Like they're there to see the movie, but they're all junked and abandoned. Mostly missing wheels. And they're just they they just got put there like that. And it looks like everybody just kind of left the salt and sea midmov. It's really cool to see. I I would strongly suggest looking up that picture. I don't remember where I saw it. Uh, well, I I'll do you even better. There's a video on YouTube because that's a very I mean, people aren't tourism wise, they're not flocking there, but people like me and people that are the same kind of people go to like abandoned uh um roller coaster parks, amusement parks,

um will still go to the Saltton Sea to kind of check things out, right? And one of these videos, uh, it's from, uh, the Gnarly Speed Shop, and I think if you just look up abandoned cars at Drive-In on YouTube, gnarly Speed Shop,

um, they do a cool video sort of walkthrough of the drive-in and the surrounding area.

Um, there's this very, like every picture you see of this, there's a a very kind of striking old orange Maverick

uh, car sitting in the front of frame because I guess it's, you know, kind of closest to the road,

right? And there was graffiti on it and I could never tell what it said from the pictures, but on the video I was able to pause it and it says, "You infected me in a way I didn't know was possible," which is very creepy. I don't know if that was like a message to a a longlost love or if it was, you know, relating to the salt and sea and what happened there, but uh it's a pretty cool video. And um there were boats in the parking lot, too. So I don't think like it just looks like everyone got up in the middle of the movie. I think people just like went and like parked their cars in this abandoned lot is what happened.

Sure. Sure. Yeah. I know that they didn't do that. It didn't happen that rapidly, but that's what it looks like and I think it's so cool, you know.

I didn't think you thought I didn't think you thought that. So, um I I remembered where I saw it, Chuck. I saw it on a slideshow on all that's interesting.

Great. Okay. So, uh do you want to take a second break and come back and talk about how it has gotten even worse than what we've said so far?

Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Learning stuff from Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. Lately, I've been learning some stuff about insomnia or aluminia. How about the one on borderline disorder? Better yet, reporter. Heard that one before, but it was so nice. I learned it twice. Everybody listen up. Oh, it's Charles and Joshua. It's stop.

Okay, Chuck. So, um, the Sultan Sea has really gone downhill. There's no denying it. People have decamped from there. Not just vacationers, but people who live there, too. Just moved away because it's gotten so gross. Um, we didn't mention it, but one of the things that happened, I think, I don't remember what year it was, there was a um, a sulfur dioxide cloud that wafted basically all across Southern California all the way to Los Angeles and it stunk like rotten eggs and they traced it back to the salt and sea. It was all of the decomposition of all the muck, all the dead fish, all the everything.

It was so bad that you could smell it all over Southern California. So this is the the state that the salt and seasons people are like we need to do something about this and for years and years uh starting in the early late 90s early 2000s the idea was let's just restore it to its former glory

and that idea became a non-starter essentially for the next couple decades because that's just a bad idea. You can't do it now. It's too late. But it took a while for uh the California government to figure that out.

Yeah. There we'll talk about a bunch of the stops and starts over the years. Uh in 2003 um the water districts of Southern California um signed off there was this deal that they had been negotiating for years called the quantification settlement agreement or QSA. And basically what they were trying to get done was say, "Hey, let's once again take some of that Colorado River water

and um the stuff that they had been using for irrigation is now being redirected to like, you know, a lot of that area was then built up into more urban areas in the Coachella Valley and like San Diego. And they're like, well, we want that water now,

right? And in exchange, those areas would say, "All right, now what we're going to do is pay the farmers there a lot of money to upgrade their old equipment. It was really inefficient irrigation equipment. Uh the newer versions won't have nearly as much um waste water.

Um and so they're like, let's let's do a trade-off here. We'll pay you to upgrade your stuff, and in return, you give us a lot of the water that we need."

Right? So the the problem as far as the salt and sea is concerned that agricultural runoff remember was keeping it going.

Yeah. So since there's less irrigation runoff because these irrigation techniques have been vastly updated um there's no not really any agricultural runoff coming and feeding the salt and sea any longer. And part of that um quantification settlement agreement was we need to take some of this water that the Imperial Valley farmers used to use and feed it into the salt and sea for 15 years.

Yeah. They even paid the farmers to leave some of their landfallow so they could direct that water to the salt and sea. Um, in retrospect that seems like total madness that they were essentially wasting all of that water,

but it actually turned out to be preient even though they didn't quite realize that it was a good thing for there to be water there until we figure out what to do.

It's sort of like leaving the water on in your tub with the drain slightly open and just being like, we're just going to leave the tub of water on for 15 years so we can keep this body of water.

Yes. But your tub you got from an abandoned house, right? And it had it has bath water that's 100 years old and full of pollutants and algae and you're just running your water into it.

Yeah. So it's a horror movie tub. It's a Yes. Exactly. That's exactly what it is.

Yeah. So, you might be asking like, "Hey, if this thing wasn't supposed to be there to begin with, if the whole idea of a body of water out in the middle of the desert like that is just going to dry up naturally, like just let it dry up naturally." And like, what's the big deal? Um, one of the big deals is is that there's still a lot of biodiversity there. Um, it's not like it killed everything. It seems like that eventually might happen, but um, it's still a habitat. It's still a migratory stop for birds on that that fly route,

right? Uh and it's because, you know, Southern California has been developed so much, uh a lot of the other natural habitats for them have gone away. So the salt and sea was, as sad as it was, was like a an oasis for them almost,

right? Yeah. Um that that is sad because if the salt and sea is the more attractive option because that's all that's left.

Yeah. Those po poor birds are in trouble. Yeah. Uh it's not just the birds that are in trouble. There are people that still live around there. Uh, in fact, I was really surprised to find this. Sultan City, uh, which I believe is the biggest town along the Sultan Sea. It's on the Northwest Shore. Their population actually increased since the 2020 census by almost a thousand people, which you're like, a,000 people? Who cares? Well, it they were less than 6,000 in population uh, at the time of the 2020 census. So, people are moving there because the housing is so affordable.

It's insane. Um, so there's people there. There's there's in the whole region there's something like 650,000 people. And all of those people are at tremendous risk right now of a a cornucopia of health hazards that are starting to develop because of the salt and sea evaporates more and more and more because the runoff isn't sustaining it anymore and it's so hot. that exposed seabed or lake bed that's so chalk full of toxins that you can barely look at it

is turning to dust that's getting blown off into the surrounding areas and causing all sorts of problems.

Yeah. Um asthma they've already found an uptick in asthma. Um there's a uh a doctor named Jill Johnson, a PhD

who's an assistant professor of preventative medicine at uh Southern Cal and she's working on a research project called the Sultan Sea and Children's Health Colon assessing Imperial Valley respiratory health and environment in the environment uh along with uh partner uh Shore Farzan another PhD and they're basically following elementary school children in that area and and seeing how their health is advancing. and right now um pretty bad asthma rates and uh they haven't proved causation yet, but it seems like it's probably headed that way.

Yeah. Apparently they just like this month published an article on their findings from this in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. You know that rag.

Yeah. And um it basically is like this is yes, this is causing asthma at the very least in little kids. There's all sorts of other stuff to worry about, too, because there's metals, pesticides, DDTs been found in there. There's just so much crud in there that now that it's um drying up is turning into dust and getting carried as particulate matter that you don't you don't want to breathe that stuff in. And yet, it's just blowing around because again, now that's turned into desert, but it's toxic desert.

Yeah. Uh and that's that's just like health issues. There's also um like a financial impact. There was a study about 11 years ago or so um from the Pacific Institute. They're a think tank in Oakland that um deals with water policy

and they said the financial toll could be as much as $70 billion over the next 30 years,

right? Like property values like you said going south, uh public health, which we've mentioned, uh the the continued loss of recreational revenue and natural habitat. So, you know, there's a big financial burden. So, you know, obviously because of that, California over the past like, you know, 25 years has had various stops and starts with funding for different projects that'll get approved and then the money just gets diverted or never shows up.

Yeah. And especially before that um 2014 study from the Pacific Institute, people are like, uh, this $8 billion seems like a little much to to um to restore the salt and sea. One of the reasons why is because the area that the salt and sea is in, the people who live around it are fairly um low income. It's a very rural area and a lot of the people who are affected live in Mexico. So back in Sacramento, the capital of California, which is pretty far away from the salt and sea,

yeah, the political will just hasn't been there. And one of the things you could do if you were a senator, a congressperson, a governor, you could fully go after a bunch of funds to save the salt and sea and remediate the area and and get it back to its former glory. And then your legislature would say, "No, we're not funding that." And you'd be like, "Oh man, I tried." And that seems like what the pattern was for the first like about 20-ish years, maybe a little more than that, that people started coming up with ideas to to do something about this.

Yeah. Gray Davis when he was governor in 2003, uh, signed the Salt and Sea rec I'm sorry, restoration act uh, and the Salt and Sea Restoration Fund, but that didn't receive funding. So a fund without funding is not a fund.

No. Um, just like a sea without an outlet is a lake. Right. Yes, absolutely. All right. Uh, in 2007, the core of engineers, uh, the Army Corps of Engineers got authorization to spend up to 30 million on projects. Uh, the money was finally appropriated in 2015 and, uh, the Obama administration uh, spent a couple of hundred grand is all on a study, another study even.

That was the 30 million. That's what it turned out to be from what I can tell. It went from $30 million to $200,000 and it was for another study. Isn't that crazy?

Yeah. I mean, none of this though is going to make any difference. I mean, even a $30 million thing or I think um there was one plan uh yeah, a 10-year Salt and Sea plan uh to cost 383 million, but that's not even for restoration cuz like you said, that ship has sailed. Um it it is a multi multi-billion dollar thing if they want to get this thing back to the California Riviera. So, right, it doesn't seem like that's just ever going to happen. It's not even possible.

No. So, now they're looking at restoring parts of it to turn it back into wetlands for birds. Right.

And that 10-year plan, it was um estimated to cost $383 million just to do that.

Yeah. And it looked like it was just going to be another another pie in the sky proposal that would never get funding. But California came up with something like $200 million of that. there under um Gavin Newsome. Uh in the last couple years, there's been huge crazy movements compared to what had been done the last couple of decades. And California came up with $200 million out of nowhere. Mbogglingly, the federal government chipped in another $240 million, $245. So now this project that needed 383 million has almost half a billion.

So, not only are they now on the salt and sea saying like, you know, when are we ever going to be able to do anything about this to we can actually do more than we wanted to do in our 10-year plan. The things are starting to pick up and they're starting to restore wetlands and um it it actually looks like it's going to not be quite the ecological disaster that it would have been had California just sat on its hands. Yeah, I think uh between 2003 and 2016 um just a few dozen acres of the wetland were restored. Uh since then about 2,000 more and uh the species conservation habitat project has a plan over the next decade to restore another 9,000 acres. So that'd be like roughly 12,000 acres of restoration, which is pretty good. Um, they also think that, you know, it's Southern California, so it's it's a a moneyed area in general. Um, not that exact area, but they're saying like, hey, we can like we've got this great

land there that we can make money off still. Uh, remember that Mullet Island that's on the dormant volcano? Um, that means there's some hot spots there. And so, uh, some people are saying, "Hey, let's let's put a few billion dollars toward a geothermal electricity plant."

Yeah. Yeah. Um or maybe mine some lithium. Yes, I believe they're already building the plants there. And then the lithium, I don't know if they've actually started that, but there's a lot of lithium there. And that is like 21st century gold because you use that and batteries for electric vehicles for giant batteries to back up your power grid. And um there's a a push and pull over whether to lithium mine there. And of course, they're going to end up lithium mining there because it's just so valuable. Um, but some people are like, "It's already an environmental catastrophe. Who cares if lithium mining makes it a little bit worse? It's better than mining in a more pristine area and really screwing that up."

And other people are like, "No, we're trying to restore it. So lithium mining is going to not only undo that stuff, it's going to make it even worse than it was." But

my money is definitely on them lithium mining. Yeah, agreed. There's a couple other things that are noteworthy about the salt and sea. I I guess we can leave that part that there's actually hope for it right now. Um but along the way, like you can imagine such a bizarre place generated some really interesting urban legends over the years, right?

Oh yeah. Some of them are actually true. The Navy used to use the salt and sea to to drop test bombs or dummy bombs to basically train their bomber pilots how to drop bombs. And they actually supposedly practiced for um atomic bomb drops. And they are so there's dummy bombs under the salt and sea still. And of course locals are like that's just a cover story. They actually lost an atomic bomb and that's what's hiding there. There's an undetonated atomic bomb under there.

Now there are a bunch of Navy planes that did crash. I think 18 flyers died over the years. But there's 24 planes sunken in the Sultan Sea right now. And then there's this one really weird legend that predates the salt and sea. There's it's the lost ship of the desert. Have you ever heard of that?

Never heard of it. Well, it's apparently this legend or lore that there was a anything from a Spanish gallion to a Viking ship that sailed up the go the Gulf of California and eventually got stuck and that that turned into desert and the ship was swallowed up. And some people are saying it was actually in the Sultan basin which is now under underneath the Sultan Sea. So there's this whole idea that there's a Viking ship potentially under there too.

Wow. Yeah. There's a great dive bar. The ski in, right? Yeah. That's uh it's in that video. They go to ski in and uh play creepy old piano and have some beer.

Yeah. They call it the lowest dive bar in the Western Hemisphere because it's 237 feet below sea level, I think. Yeah, right there at uh I don't know if they still call it Bombay Beach or if they took that name away, but Bombay Non Beach because a beach without water is not a beach,

right? Uh there's also it's attracted a lot of artists too like Slab City is essentially a taken over military installation. Um there's a folk art installation called Salvation Mountain. There's another whole like outdoor gallery um called East Jesus I believe is what it's called. So, there's a lot of art that's being made there. Um, that's kind of turning it into a a really neat, weird, decrepit art place.

Cool. Yeah. Uh, you got anything else? Uh, I got nothing else. Okay. Well, that's it for the Salt and Sea, everybody. We'll have to keep an eye on it and see what happens. And, uh, in the meantime, I think it's time for listener mail. Well, speaking of art, uh before I read listener mail, I want to give a plug to uh dear old Ben, our our comrade here at Stuff You Should Know, our colleague. Uh he is a producer along with Jerry. Uh and Ben is a musician, Ben Hackett, and he put out a great uh piece of art. Uh he put out a record called Songs for Sleeping Dogs

not too long ago. And Ben's awesome. Uh Songs for Sleeping Dogs is great. It's this very viby instrumental. I think you'd dig it actually.

Uh and so yeah, go check it out. Yeah. Wherever you get music basically. Yes. Ben is our probably our most beloved Stuff You Should Know member cuz he's just so cool and chill and nice.

Whoa. Yeah. Say that in front of Jerry. Mhm. Okay. All right. Listener mail time. Uh we got a couple over the next couple of episodes on MTV and VH1 because we got great response. Uh, and it was also another one of those weird things where we did an episode and then something in real life happened and we had no idea that when we did our MTV episode that like the next week MTV would fold basically.

Yeah, it's music channels. Uh, it was just one of those strange stuff you should know things that happen sometimes.

I didn't quite understand. So, like it was just its music channels. I didn't know that it had any music channels left.

Yeah, I think we talked about that. That there was still some some music happening. Well, Jerry just buzzed in and said it's just in Europe, so I don't know what to believe now.

Well, they definitely did something and it was right after our episode for sure.

Yeah. All right. So, this is about MTV. Uh, hey guys. Hoping that you would touch on this, especially toward the end when Josh is talking about the social impacts of MTV, but I'm talking about the MTV cut. Before MTV, the average shot in a film or television show lasted an average of 8 seconds, and the MTV cut uh whittleled that down to 2 seconds.

Wow. Uh, in college circa 2000 it was called the MTV cut. Now the MTV cut is the norm. You'd be hardressed to find a show that stays on one shot for 8 seconds consistently anymore. I wonder if people changed or if the MTV cut changed people and the way we watch.

I believe I'll bet that's one of those things where if you saw it now, you'd be like, "Wow, this is really weird." And not quite put your finger on why, but it' just be almost unsettling to see an 8-second cut. Maybe I mean I remember people talking about like quick cut because of music videos. Like it was a thing. Uh that is from Chris Singleton

who is uh an ops manager for Independence Rock Media. Very nice. So Chris knows what they're talking about.

I think so. Well, thanks a lot Chris. That was very interesting. And we want to hear from you, too. If you've got anything interesting to say, you can email me, too.

Yeah, you can. Yes, we want to hear from Bono and the Edge and the other guys. Oh, boy. Um, what?

Madam and Larry. Come on. There you go. Thank you. I could have come up with those given a couple of months for sure.

Sure. Um, so, uh, yeah, if you want to be like the band you two, you can email us at stuffpodcast@ iheartradio.com.

Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts, iMheart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

Josh Clark (Host), Chuck Bryant (Host), Jerry (Guest), Ben Hackett (Guest), Jill Johnson (Guest).

What is "Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW" about?

The Salton Sea, located in Southern California, is an ecological disaster resulting from human intervention, primarily due to agricultural runoff and mismanagement of water resources. This inland lake, often inaccurately referred to as a "sea," faces severe environmental challenges, impacting local wildlife and communities, and highlights the critical need for sustainable water management…

What is mentioned in this Stuff You Should Know episode?

28 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Salt and Sea, Sultan Sea, Chuck Bryant, Josh Malcolm Clark, Colorado River, quantification settlement agreement. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Eco-Disasters 101: The Salton Sea | STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW"?

The episode runs 48 min; the transcript is about 8,881 words in 173 timestamped sections.

More from Stuff You Should Know

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 24, 2026.