AS THE TEMPERATURE on an early April afternoon crept above 80 degrees, Cruz Marquez, a member of the Salton Sea Community Science Program, stood at a folding table under a blue tent, scrubbing a small glass vial with the cloth of his T-shirt. The vial, which held 20 milliliters of water from the nearby Salton Sea, had to be clean before he inserted it into a photometer to identify the water’s contaminant levels.
Less than a decade earlier, the beach where Marquez stood lay under the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake. Over the last 25 years,
