![]() ![]() Here, it exists naturally in a liquid form, so extraction doesn’t require mining or blasting. In other places, lithium is taken from the earth using hard rock mining that leaves huge, ugly scars in the land. What’s more, with the Salton Sea Basin’s unique geography, engineers and technicians can get the lithium with minimal environmental destruction, according to companies that are working there. Lithium is the lightest naturally occurring metal element on Earth, and, for that reason among others, it’s important for electric car batteries, which must store a lot of electricity in a package that weighs as little as possible. Over the past few years, companies have been coming here to extract a valuable metal, lithium, that the car industry needs as it shifts to making electric cars. The highways that ring the lake are traversed now mostly by passing trucks. It’s left behind abandoned buildings and shallow, gray beaches. At one time, it was a thriving entertainment and recreation spot, business that has also largely dried up. ![]() The largest inland lake in California, it’s 51 miles long from north to south and 17 miles wide, but gradually shrinking as less and less water flows into it. The Salton Sea, which lies roughly in the middle of the massive geologic low point, isn’t really a sea, at all. It’s hot and, deep underground, it is literally boiling. It’s a big, flat gray desert ringed with high mountains that look pale in the distance. It lies where two enormous chunks of the Earth’s crust, the North American Plate and the Pacific Plate, are very slowly pushing past one another creating an enormous low spot in the land. ![]()
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