User:Chessfunblast/Salton Sea

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Over 20% of the children in the region have asthma (with the national rate being less than 10%).

In January 2018, all the water that had been flowing into the Salton Sea as relief from the Quantification Settlement Agreement had transferred to urban centers. This sudden change led to the start of a "rapid decline in volume and a rapid increase in salinity" for the Salton Sea. As a result, thousands of acres of deposit are becoming visible, which may become a birthplace of toxic dust due to the local dry and windy environment.

Tilapia populations have reached such low volumes such that the fish-eating birds in the area cannot be sustained anymore. Scientists have approximated that if the sea's salinity reaches levels of 70 ppt (more likely to occur than not due to the end of mitigation flows at the start of 2018), there won't be any species of fish left that will be able to survive in the sea's main body. As the decline of Tilapia populations in the Salton Sea continues, there has been an immense proliferation of the water boatman population which do serve as feed for "a limited number of aquatic and shorebird species".

A direct concern of the potential eradication of fish species from the sea include mosquito production, which is usually abundant in high salinity salt marshes but have been low due to the presence of fish. There have been worries about this potential outcome as mosquitoes in warm regions have been known to "act as vectors of West Nile virus, Western equine encephalitis and St. Louis encephalitis".