This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

The largest body of water in California was formed by mistake.

In 1905, the California Development Company accidentally flooded a huge salty depression in the Sonoran Desert known as the Salton Sink, creating an enormous salty lake called the Salton Sea. And here we are at the edge of the Salton Sea.

It's incredible.

You almost can't see across.

And we're just at the tip.

It's pretty narrow here.

Reporter Emmett Fitzgerald recently visited the salt and sea on a hot summer day in the desert.

Yeah, it's just a mile to 107 right now.

The water is twice as salty as the Pacific Ocean. The only fish that can live there are

tilapia, and even they struggle sometimes.

It's just a line of dead fish, dead tilapia, and then, oh my God, these flies everywhere.

The ground beneath the southern end of the sea is volcanic and boiling water bubbles

to the surface in muddy pools.

It feels post-apocalyptic and prehistoric, all at the same time,

but it's also weirdly beautiful.

And the sea isn't dead. The water is teeming with microbial life and the beaches are covered with sandpipers, egrets, and pelicans.

This sea, this gurgling, sometimes stinky, accident of a sea is actually in danger of drawing up and

disappearing.

And you may be thinking, good riddens, it doesn't sound all that nice, and you wouldn't be alone.

Over the years, it's been hard to get people to care about saving the salt and sea,

in part because it doesn't seem natural enough. In general, we tend to think about places and objects as either natural or unnatural.

...