Once a glamorous resort that drew bigger crowds than Yosemite, the Salton Sea is now a toxic desert wasteland where shores have been paved with millions of dead fish and dust clouds threaten local children. This episode traces the accidental birth of California's largest lake in 1905, when an uncontrolled engineering blunder sent the entire Colorado River pouring into a dry basin below sea level, then its rise as a mid-century paradise sustained entirely by agricultural runoff.

We follow the slow ecological collapse driven by rising salinity, fertilizer-fueled algae blooms, and catastrophic fish and bird die-offs, then the public health crisis unleashed when a 2003 water transfer agreement exposed a toxic lakebed. Finally, we examine the stunning twist: geothermal brine beneath the sea holds roughly a third of the global lithium supply, pot ...