Answer: What happened here over the past 40 years?

 

Date shakes.... yum.....   

Shields Date Farm--with excellent date milkshakes and fascinating educational videos.

I haven't been to Indio in probably 20 years, so I was fairly surprised when I happened to look at the Coachella Valley on Google Maps last week.  It's a MUCH different place than I remember from the days when we drove through in search of date-based frozen confections. 

It's useful to know this: the center of US date production is near Indio, in the Coachella Valley.  That, plus ice cream, means date shakes.  

 

All of these changes leads us to this week's Challenge:  

What are the largest changes to landuse in the Coachella Valley over the past 40 years?  (That is, the valley centered around: 33.711896, -116.210818) What kinds of changes can you spot?  

There are many ways to do this piece of SearchResearch, but a GREAT way start such investigations is by getting a visual overview.  Google Maps works well to get a look at the place from the maps overview.  

Even at this range, you can get a big clue from all of the green blocks... 

That's a lot of golf courses!  It's even more interesting in satellite view: 

Aside from all of the green here, there's also a LOT of water in this view.  

Of course, Google Earth has archival images (we've discussed this before).  Here's a pic from 2002 of the Indio area.  Contrast this with the image above from 2020.  

But wait--isn't this a desert?   Look at the color of all the ground all around the valley!  Note how far away Death Valley is (not far).  

So, sure, the valley is pretty clearly well-watered, but surrounded by desert.  (And yes, I know that looks like a giant lake in the bottom right corner--but that's the Salton Sea.  It's pretty salty--about 60 parts per thousand. By comparison the ocean is about 35 PPT. What's worse--the salinity of the Sea increases every year since it doesn't have an outflow, but just slowly evaporates.  

From a land-use perspective, how is it possible to support all of those golf courses and lakes in the desert?  

While that's an interesting land-use question, how can we quickly get an overview of 40 years of land uses?  That's a lot of time to cover.  What about a timelapse satellite view? 

My query: 

     [ time lapse Earth ] 

leads quickly to Google Earth Timelapse.  It doesn't take long to search for Indio and the Coachella Valley.  Here's the YouTube video I made that neatly shows the enormous changes in the valley between 1984 and 2018.