I don't think it's just the brine that's concerning. Remember all of those toxic pesticides and heavy metals the author mentions? The ones causing health problems for residents of the Salton Sea area?
Those have to go someplace as well, and they would be mixed into that brine. Dumping a more concentrated version of that sludge into the gulf sounds like a bad time for people who live in the gulf region.
Don't get me wrong, I love this idea. I just know that there are hidden externalities here which need to be examined and dealt with properly.
Existing ocean currents in the Gulf of California driven by wind, tides, and thermohaline circulation are on the order of 10cm/s, tens of kilometers wide, hundreds of meters deep. Very little of that is associated with local rivers, which are relatively tiny because the whole region is extremely arid. Are you going to be desalinating 0.1 km^2 of water per second?
The Sun pumps a thousand watts a square meter onto the surface of the Earth on a 24-hour cycle and this tends to shake things up.
Those have to go someplace as well, and they would be mixed into that brine. Dumping a more concentrated version of that sludge into the gulf sounds like a bad time for people who live in the gulf region.
Don't get me wrong, I love this idea. I just know that there are hidden externalities here which need to be examined and dealt with properly.