Beneath The Salton Sea

Every memory is a recording. Nothing about the Salton Sea is normal. The sand isn't sand. Just piles and piles of desiccated bones. There are little pockets where life clings on, birds, reptiles, people. It's an ecosystem of living things that rely on other living things too stubborn to leave. Life forcing itself on death, or maybe the other way around. Dee and her wife Sharon find this out the hard way after making a quick stop at Salvation Mountain to film some b-roll and see the sights out in the middle of the vast nothing. A bizarre rumor of a "crack in the sky" from one of the locals sends them on the hunt for an abandoned yacht club- where they make a discovery that changes their lives forever, and those close to them as well. Could you identify a loved one by their whisper? Beneath the Salton Sea is a cosmic horror technological nightmare transcribing the raw honesty of what makes a family, what breaks them, the difficulties of communication, and the painful joy of memories. If you knew this was the last thing I'd ever tell you, what would you want me to say?

The Salton Sea was an accident of man created when heavy rainfall caused the Rio Colorado to swell and breach an Imperial Valley dike in 1905. For two years, water flowed into the Salton Sink and ancient Lake Cahuilla. Today, the sea is 227 feet below sea level, covers approximately 376 square miles, and is California's largest lake. During the early 1900s, it became an important bird and waterfowl refuge. When many species of fish were introduced, the Salton Sea also became popular for boating, fishing, hunting, and camping activities. Motels, yacht clubs, and marinas developed around Salton City and North Shore. During recent decades, the sea has become polluted from agricultural runoff, creating a doubtful future for the Salton Sea. However, it remains a sanctuary for anyone who enjoys bird watching, desert landscapes, or beautiful farmlands.

Tough choices loom if the world wants to go green. The United States and other countries must decide where and how to procure the materials that make our renewable energy economy possible. To build electric vehicles, solar panels, cell phones, and millions of other devices means the world must dig more mines to extract lithium, copper, cobalt, rare earths, and nickel. But mines are deeply unpopular, even as they have a role to play in fighting climate change. These tensions have sparked a worldwide reckoning over the sourcing of these critical minerals, and no one understands the complexities of these issues better than Ernest Scheyder, whose exclusive access has allowed him to report from the front lines on the key players in this global battle to power our future.

The world is moving towards replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy. But building electric vehicles, solar panels, and millions of other devices requires digging more mines. Critical minerals are vital to many sustainable technologies, and the competition for them is intensifying. Nations which aspire to energy independence are ever more intertwined: a hedge fund manager's attempt to revive rare earths mining in California needs Chinese expertise, and international reliance on Africa's mining sector persists despite concern over child labour. Meanwhile, ecological dilemmas abound: a proposed lithium mine in Nevada would help global car manufacturers slash their dependence on fossil fuels, but developing that mine could cause the extinction of a flower found nowhere else on the planet. As investors attempt to predict how the geopolitics of resource extraction will unfold, this is a story of the industry giants, researchers, and policymakers at the forefront of the new energy wars.