East of Los Angeles, there's a landlocked salty lake called the Salton Sea.

Once advertised as a swanky tourist destination in the 1950s and 60s, it's now drying up.

Toxic dust from the exposed lake bed is severely impacting the health of local residents.

This is Scientific Americans Science Quickly. I'm Kate Furby.

I've been there when there's been dust storms, where it's been very difficult to actually

drive or see because of the compared visibility. There's just this very rotten egg smell

in the summertime and it's not a really great place to be.

That's Ann Cheney, an associate professor at the University of California Riverside,

who studies public health and health services at the Salton Sea.

At one level you look and you can see the sea and it's beautiful.

You can see the palm trees, so you're embedded between these two mountain chains.

But then you breathe and then you remember that you're in an environment where at any moment

the wind could pick up and bring the toxicity from the playa of the drying sea into your body.

The Salton Sea is the largest lake in California, but it actually started out as an accident.

150 years ago it didn't even exist. It was basically just a dry valley.

Then in 1905 a canal breached and flooded the ancient lake bed with water from the Colorado River,

which created an oasis. A sea in the desert with its wide sandy beaches, no tides or dangerous

underparents and with literally millions of fish ready for the taking.

For a while small rivers and irrigation runoff fed the lake.

In the 1950s and 60s it was developed to be the next Palm Spring, a chic pastel getaway

that was drivable from Hollywood. Here is where you can find the good life in the sun.

Today the Salton River era, beside the blue Salton Sea, is the place for you to take

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