A little over 400 miles south of  here you will find California’s largest mass of water — the 343 square-mile Salton Sea.

It is a beautiful and forbidding place. Its waters teem with both life and death dictated by the ebb and flow of salinity levels.

Man in his majestic sense of self-importance believes an act of man created the Salton Sea.

It is only true in the limited grasp most of us have on the forces of nature. The earth is estimated to be 4.543 billion years old. Mankind as in homo sapiens popped up around 200,000 years ago. Our “extensive” month-to-month and year-to-year scientific measurement on the land area we call California started in earnest just over 170 years ago.

Perhaps it is forgivable then for many of us to believe the Salton Sea was created in 1905 by an engineering accident by an irrigation company tapping Colorado River water to convert desert into productive farmland. By the time the accident was plugged, enough water had flowed into the Salton Sink of which much is 200 feet below sea level to flood 400 square miles.

Unbeknownst at the time, man was simply emulating nature.

The lake they created had actually appeared and disappeared numerous times over the past thousands upon thousands of years. It last went dry around 1580.

The sink that sits on the San Andreas Fault where two tectonic plates grind against each other ever so slowly is further proof of the existence of megadroughts throughout  the West over the course of thousands of years before those that founded the modern-era California civilization stumbled across it during a rare break of a 100 years or so that offered abundant snow and rain.

Why you should care about the Salton Sea has everything to do with the price of gasoline.

As  the twirling of pump dollar and cent displays gives you whiplash as gas prices spin toward $7 per gallon and beyond the Salton Sea — or more precisely what “energy” companies are pushing to do below its surface — could be emerging as a player in the energy sector.

They are targeting a large underground reserve of what is referenced as geothermal brine. It is best described as a hot soup of saltwater, minerals, and metals mixed at scalding temperatures. From nature’s red-hot concoction one can extract lithium.

Lithium, if you are a deeper thinker than a typical star-struck Tesla groupie, is an essential key to making electric vehicle batteries.

The United States imports virtually all of the lithium it uses. Among the top 10 producers are a number of countries not overly friendly with the United States including Chile and China at No. 2 and No. 3.

To top that off the United States doesn’t make the top 10 list of nickel producing nations. Russia does.

In fact, Russia produces 7 percent of the world’s supply of nickel.

Nickel is also an essential ingredient in manufacturing electric vehicle batteries.

Keep in mind Russia is the world’s third largest oil producer ahead of China but behind the United States and Saudi Arabia.

For a number of reasons, 3 percent of our nation’s oil is imported from Russia.

And even though California ranks seventh in oil production among the states and is thought by some to harbor as much as a third of the reserves if modern fracking techniques are tossed into the equation, California produced only 28.9 percent of what we consumed in 2021. Alaska production accounted for 14.9 percent with rest — 56.2 percent being foreign imports.

Accounting for the sources of foreign oil consumed in California based on data from the state energy commission are Ecuador 24.13 percent, Saudi Arabia 22.85 percent, Iraq 20.41 percent, Colombia 7.967 percent, Mexico 4.57 percent, Brazil 4.2 percent, Brunei 2.37 percent, Nigeria 1.99 percent, Angola 1.81 percent, and other nations 9.8 percent.

If you haven’t figured it out yet the prospect of going to war over energy and commodities — or using them as weapons — is far from passe regardless of how advanced we think we have become as a human race.

At the same time those among the owners of electric vehicles that are acting on the smug side these days bypassing $5 plus per gallon gasoline and skipping out on their fair share of gas tax to maintain roads not to mention the sales tax bonanza the state will rake in from soaring fuel prices, could very well wake up in a world in a few years where the prices of replacement EV batteries or those in new cars will be soaring through the roof because of the political hierarchy in Russia, China, or some other nation that views the West as less than amenable.

This, of course, is compounded by sharpened environmental concerns in the United States over things such as fracking for oil or disturbing fragile desert ecosystems in the mining of other energy strategic metals besides nickel and lithium.

The process that firms want to employ beneath the Salton Sea has already started stirring serious environmental concerns.

The biggest to date are being expressed by ingenious Americans with concerns about the possibility the geothermal extraction process will dry up springs in ancestral grounds if it breached one of them during drilling.

Surface water isn’t likely to be impacted, experts such as Michael McKibben, an associate professor emeritus of geology at the University of California, Riverside have noted. But the same experts have pointed out no one really knows what is “down there” meaning there is a possibility they could penetrate an aquifer that has taken thousands of years to collect water to feed springs as well as potable water tables above them.

Then there is the issue of messing with the San Andreas Fault. Fracking ­— which involves a similar process — has been blamed for triggering swarms of earthquakes in the Midwest.

It is safe to say we should be concerned about actively “mining” the bubbling geothermal brines below the surface possibly exacerbating normal quake activity along that stretch of the San Andreas Fault.

What looks like a better alternative today for energy can have unintended and unexpected consequences down the road.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t aggressively pursue alternatives to augment or supplant fossil fuels. It just that other energy sources can also be subject to geopolitical whims plus have their own set of environmental damages.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com