The Shrinking Salton Sea

  • Released Sunday, August 30, 2026
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California's largest lake, the Salton Sea, has experienced a severe decline in water levels over recent years. Driven by reduced agricultural runoff, persistent regional drought, and extreme heat, the lake's shoreline has rapidly retreated, exposing vast swaths of dry lakebed. This time series of Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 (HLS) imagery documents the dramatic shrinking of the Salton Sea, highlighting a critical environmental transformation that continues to reshape the landscape.

A natural-color HLS time series of the Salton Sea spanning from April 29, 2013, to June 8, 2026, showing the dramatic water loss and retreating shorelines of the sea over time.

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NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

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Datasets used

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This page was originally published on Sunday, August 30, 2026.
This page was last updated on Monday, August 31, 2026 at 4:28 PM EDT.