Customer Reviews

Salton Sea Atlas

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The Salton Sea Atlas explores issues and information regarding California's largest lake and most valuable environmental resource -- the Salton Sea.

This book is a must for those interested in the Salton Sea, environmental change, water issues in the American Southwest, history, or geography. Its graphical synthesis of complex social, scientific, and geographic information is superb and can be appreciated by all audiences. This is a wonderful publication.

I recommend it wholeheartedly

This book is wonderful! I highly recommend it.

The Salton Sea Atlas covers the complex issues facing this very special body of water in a clear, yet comprehensive, fashion (use of graphics and illustrations over exhaustive use of text). It's a beautiful book, and the most wide-ranging piece about the Salton Sea that I've been able to find. You will not be disappointed with it.

Buy this book

--Just wanted to second the comments of the other reviewers regarding the quality and presentation of this book. It's a scientific work undertaken by the Salton Sea Database Program of the Redlands Institute of the University of Redlands, but it's enclosed within a lovely and large glossy coffee table book. It also includes much information about the cultural history of the Salton Sea and its region in a remote part of the southern California desert. I especially enjoyed the beautiful wildlife illustrations and biological information, though most of the book covers the physical science of the Salton Sea. I gave a copy to someone at a Christmas party held many miles away at the Orange County coast, and people literally were waiting and nagging for their turn to look through this beautiful book about this mysterious and controversial inland subtropical sea.

I think it is remarkable that a rather small part of California could produce such a fascinating (and visually stunning) book but the Salton Sea is a quite remarkable place, especially considering it's only a few decades old. One bit of information that grabbed me is on page forty where a graphic profile of the Sea reveals that it is, on average, only fifty-one feet deep compared with Lake Tahoe which is 1645 feet at its deepest.

The Atlas is sectioned into five chapters: Physical geography, Cultural history, Limnology, Ecology, and Maps. The first four take up about half the pages and assorted maps, index and bibliography the rest. The main strength of the book, I think, are the non-map pages because they present a lot of complex information in a beautifully designed graphic format. Old maps and photographs, charts, illustrations of marine and bird life, cut-away graphics of land and more are all laid out with very clean typography on the large page size. Add quality paper and printing (with a 175 screen) and anyone looking through these pages will be easily drawn into this on-going story of the Salton.

The map pages are equally interesting and there really is a lot of technical data here but still presented in an accessible format. The range of information is quite comprehensive, for example: public land ownership, recreation areas, commercial facilities, energy usage, property values and median incomes, early exploration, earthquakes, soil types, surface hydrology right down to four maps showing the Sea's sediment grain size distribution. The nice thing about the maps is that they not only detail the Sea area also large parts of southern California.

This Atlas is a credit to all those who worked on it (and should really be template for any similar publications) for making the Salton come alive in such a stimulating way.

***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover.

A beautiful, informative and spectacular oversized book on the Salton Sea. A place that needs to be saved and understood. This book will start your journey.