We ask a lot of some very small fish. Single species are relied on to save entire ecosystems. In December I tried to see the Devils Hole pupfish, which lives in a single cave just 22 metres long and 3.5 metres wide in the Amargosa Valley, Nevada. The species has been completely isolated since the end of the last Ice Age, between ten and twenty thousand years ago, when the great lake that filled Death Valley receded, fragmenting pupfish populations into separate ecological niches. Devils Hole is thought to be ‘the smallest habitat in the world containing the entire population of a vertebrate species’, and its pupfish may be the most inbred species in the world: any two individuals are on average 58 per cent genetically identical.
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Last month, Controlled Thermal Resources (CTR) broke ground on the Hell’s Kitchen Lithium and Power project, an integrated geothermal power plant and lithium production facility on the coast of the Salton Sea in Imperial County, Southern California. It should produce enough lithium to make six million car batteries a year, powered by renewable energy and promising near-zero carbon emissions.
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