When we flew into San Francisco, we noticed some really odd-looking red, orange, and green pools just off the San Francisco Bay on our approach to the airport. You can see the same pools in the satellite photo below, courtesy of “Google Maps”:http://maps.google.com/.
You can “zoom in on the pools”:http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.510071,-122.060852&spn=0.168623,0.237442&t=k&hl=en over at Google maps; the astounding thing is the vividness of the colors. Like any good geeks, we became obsessed with discovering what these pools were via the Internet.
A search on “red water san francisco”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22red+water%22+%22san+francisco%22&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official turned up the “winning match”:http://www.biologia.uniba.it/fisiologia/corcelli/en/saline/sal1.html. Apparently the pools are solar “saltern ponds”:http://www.saltinstitute.org/11.html for the “Cargill Salt”:http://www.cargillsalt.com/sfbay/T_solar_harvest.html company. Put simply, they’re growing salt in those ponds for your salt shaker. The colors come from the microorganisms that thrive in the ultra-salty environment.
Cool.
June 30th, 2005 at 2:06 pm
ew. Pass the salt please, hold the micro-organisms.