Photos: Exclusive drone views of San Francisco Bay’s colorful salt ponds

byDuc Manh •February 28, 2022

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Flying in or out of the Bay Space, you will have seen San Francisco Bay’s colourful salt ponds from above.

In any other case, lots of the ponds, which cowl roughly 16,500 acres of the bay and have been used as salt evaporation ponds because the California Gold Rush period, stay a hidden secret.

Many of the ponds had been as soon as wetlands in Newark, Hayward and Redwood Metropolis. Some are not in use, however Cargill Salt continues its operations in Newark. The salt the corporate produces is used to fabricate glass, paper, plastic, rubber, textiles, dyes, leather-based, cosmetics and prescribed drugs. The Cargill plant is able to crystallizing 500,000 tons of sea salt every year.

After almost a century of business land use, 15,000 acres of salt ponds had been put aside in 1979 to create the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Nationwide Wildlife Refuge.

State and federal wildlife businesses additionally acquired 15,100 acres of South Bay salt pond properties in San Jose’s Alviso district, Union Metropolis and Menlo Park in 2003, launching the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Venture, the most important wetland restoration venture on the West Coast, which will likely be a 50-year effort.

Final April, in what environmental teams are hailing as a “full victory,” Cargill Salt introduced that it's going to not enchantment a call by a federal choose that protects Redwood Metropolis’s salt ponds from growth, successfully halting its decades-long effort to construct hundreds of latest properties there. The venture would have been the most important growth on the bayfront since Foster Metropolis was constructed within the Nineteen Sixties.

The pond’s vibrant colours come from algae and microorganisms that dwell within the ponds, and so they differ in hue based mostly on the salinity of the water.

Employees author Aldo Toledo contributed to this report.