The Salton Sea is about 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles, but its landscape could be from another world. Once-bustling marinas in California’s largest lake, located along the San Andreas earthquake fault, are now bone-dry. The area has likely flooded and dried out several times through the ages, but a look at its history since the early 1900s also reveals many changes packed into the last 100-plus years. In the early 1900s, irrigation canals diverted Colorado River water into a dry lakebed in southeastern California.

Environmentalist have filed a lawsuit after the federal government said last week that Northern California’s delta tunnels project would not harm endangered fish in the delta and bay. That decision gave the project a big boost. The state wants to build two huge tunnels that would take water from the Sacramento River, ship the water under the delta and send that river water to existing aqueducts that already send delta water south. Californians have been fighting over water for generations. Remember all the talk of a peripheral canal? The state eventually pulled the plug on that after lots of opposition.