California has a sea that was never supposed to exist. It was created by accident in 1905, when a canal broke and much of the Colorado River poured into the open desert for nearly two years. Today it sits 230 to 240 feet below sea level, on the southern end of the San Andreas Fault system — and since around 1999 it's been shrinking. But the water disappearing isn't the dangerous part. What it leaves behind is.

In this video, I count down 7 things about the Salton Sea that shouldn't be true — from how a shallow "puddle the size of a city" ended up underground, to the farm-runoff that kept it alive for decades, to the cruel twist where conserving water helped kill it, to the toxic lakebed dust now affecting kids' lungs in Imperial County. And the #1 fact flips the whole story: this has happened before — a lake six times larger called Lake Cahuilla — and the money that might one day fix it could come from the lithium buried beneath the region.

So here's the question: do you fix a lake that was never supposed to exist, or let it go back to being desert? Drop your home state in the comments and tell me what you'd do.

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