Charleston Slough

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Dawn at the slough Dawn at the Slough.jpg
Dawn at the slough

Charleston Slough is a former Leslie salt pond that is now reverting to marsh [1] on the western shore of San Francisco Bay.

Leslie Salt

The Leslie Salt Company was a salt-producing company located in the San Francisco Bay Area, at the current locations of Newark, Hayward and other parts of the bay. They produced salt using salt evaporation ponds on the shores of the San Francisco Bay. By the 1940s, Leslie Salt under the dominant ownership of the Schilling family had become the largest private land owner in the Bay Area. By 1959, they were producing more than one million tons of salt annually, on over 26,000 acres of bay salt ponds. They were purchased by Cargill in 1978.

Salt evaporation pond shallow artificial pond designed to extract salts from sea water or other brines

A salt evaporation pond is a shallow artificial salt pan designed to extract salts from sea water or other brines. Natural salt pans are geological formations that are also created by water evaporating and leaving behind salts. Some salt evaporation ponds are only slightly modified from their natural version, such as the ponds on Great Inagua in the Bahamas, or the ponds in Jasiira, a few kilometres south of Mogadishu, where seawater is trapped and left to evaporate in the sun.

San Francisco Bay bay on the California coast of the United States

San Francisco Bay is a shallow estuary in the US state of California. It is surrounded by a contiguous region known as the San Francisco Bay Area, and is dominated by the large cities of San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland.

Environmental damage and recovery

In 1975 Leslie Salt owned the slough and used it for its salt water evaporation operations. The company shrunk the channel and drastically restricted the tides within the slough. [2]

In 1996, the City of Mountain View embarked on an ambitious project to reverse the damage cause by Leslie, and returned the slough to a much more environmentally-friendly salt marsh. [2] Coordinates: 37°26′31″N122°05′33″W / 37.4418837°N 122.0924628°W / 37.4418837; -122.0924628 [3]

Mountain View, California City in California, United States

Mountain View is a city located in Santa Clara County, California, United States, named for its views of the Santa Cruz Mountains. From its origins as a stagecoach stop, it has developed into a large suburb of San Francisco. It has a pedestrian-friendly downtown and a population of 74,066. The city borders Palo Alto and the San Francisco Bay to the north, Los Altos to the south, and Moffett Federal Airfield and Sunnyvale to the east.

Geographic coordinate system Coordinate system

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References

  1. ↑ Sexton, Jean Deitz (1992). Silicon Valley: inventing the future : a contemporary portrait . Windsor Publications. p.  250. ISBN   978-0897813891.
  2. 1 2 McCabe, Michael (September 13, 1996). "A Tide of Change at Charleston Slough". San Francisco Chronicle . Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  3. ↑ "Charleston Slough". Geographic Names Information System . United States Geological Survey. 19 January 1981. Retrieved 30 December 2016.


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