No, its lifespan was extended by agricultural runoff offsetting the natural drying out which would have otherwise occurred after the event which formed it was corrected, but it was formed by a breach in an irrigation canal that occurred in 1905 and wasn't repaired until 1907.
Regardless, it's sort of a bad example of "humans are the virus" type thinking, since it both lived and died by agriculture.
If you really dig into the story there is an interesting commentary about the horrible Western US water rights compacts system and the continuing inability for US states, especially in the West, to accurately price water consumption in a way that makes consumers sensitive to inefficient water use. But even then, in the case of the Salton Sea, the system actually did work: inefficient agricultural use was "improved" when San Diego called for more water and farmers were forced to be more efficient. Perhaps in an ideal world those farms would never have existed at all.
> it's sort of a bad example of "humans are the virus" type thinking, since it both lived and died by agriculture.
from "Islands of Abandonment":
> As I get further out, my feet sink deeper into the thin, grey sand. When I look closer, I see it is not sand at all, but the dry bones of fish, pounded into shards, and the tiny, skull-like husks of barnacles. This is a foul place. The air is thick with brine and guano and decomposition. Even now, in the violet dusk, the heat is oppressive. But as I cross the crystallised flats, the water gleams into view, an impossible sea in the middle of the desert.
> It is a poison lake whispering sweet nothings. It promises cool succour, quenched thirst. Despite what I know of this shimmering mirage - despite the stink and the rot and the waste that surrounds it, despite the staring eyes of the dead and desiccating fish that litter its shrinking shores, despite the absence of vegetation - I can’t help but quicken my pace. I stumble through sucking mud towards this false vision, on and on until the muck is over my feet, and up to my ankles, and I am shin-deep in a warm broth that, when stirred, releases a draught so stagnant I can taste it.
Seems like an excellent example of "humans are the virus" to me. Human error created an entire lake and then human inefficiency sustained it (for a while). Now the end product of all of that human activity is poisoning the air around it.
No, its lifespan was extended by agricultural runoff offsetting the natural drying out which would have otherwise occurred after the event which formed it was corrected, but it was formed by a breach in an irrigation canal that occurred in 1905 and wasn't repaired until 1907.