The Great Salt Lake has been shrinking dramatically over the past 40 years, setting a record last year which is expected to be surpassed this summer.
And that’s a problem. Not only is the Great Salt Lake vital to the mining and tourism industries of the area, but it’s leaving behind sand that is laced with arsenic, that will blow up dust that will get into people’s lungs.
It is entirely possible that Salt Lake City may soon become a ghost town.
FYI, here is a recent New York Times article (gift link) about the situation.
This is somewhat weird, considering that SLC had exactly the opposite problem in the early 1980s, when I moved there – the Salt Lake was rising, because a lot of water had been diverted into te lake. Portions of the Lake close to where the rivers emptied into it were getting so low in salinity that dish were actually living in water that until then only supported brine shrimp (and whatever microscopic stuff they ate). The Lake was starting to undermine Interstate 80, which had to be raised several feet
I think they solved the problem by not diverting so much water in. One is tempted to say “divert it back in”, but I’m sure it’s more complex than that. The likely cause is drought – not enough rainfall on the Wasatch and other mountains, and not enough snow falling so the melting snowpack helps feed into the Lake.
I’m kind of surprised the Salt Lake is shrinking – there’s no outlet, and the precipitated salt crystals tend to reflect sunlight from the lake, minimizing evaporation from the Lake. Near the shores the salt flats tend to be semiliquid and gooshy. I guess the inflow has slowed so much that the Lake can’t cope, even with reduced evaporation.
There’s more of an issue than just the Lake going away. The only reason that the Salt Lake Valley is so luch and green is because it is constantly irrigated with that same runoff. Without artificial watering, the Salt Lake Valley would soon look like the West Valley – all low scrub and sawgrass. When I moved into SLC I found a monument to a tree stump not that far from my apartment. That stump honored the only tree between Emigration Canyon and “downtown”. Everyone stopped thhere because it was the only green and shade on the way from the entrance to the Salt Lake Valley and where they were going. Without watering, they’re headed the same way.
Not good for people or animals, either.
Can a dish really live in a lake, or just sort of, you know, be there?
I wonder if population growth (and the related increase in water demand) is also part of it. Doing some digging around on this page, it looks like the population of the Salt Lake City metropolitan area was around 677K in 1980, and is now about 1.169 million (an increase of 73%).
https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/23126/salt-lake-city/population
So this lake may have the most Sea Monkeys of any body of water?
And here I had assumed that SLC had always been unlivable.
It’s one of those things like social distancing coming to an end, where I now have to go back to all the old reasons for avoiding people.
The high levels in the mid-1980s were caused by anomalously high precipitation (known to be anomalous based on tree ring studies) and a much smaller population. “Divert the water back” won’t work because there isn’t that much water in normal times, let alone with climate change-influenced drought, and because the population has exploded since those times.
This is almost entirely the reason. Climate change hasn’t helped and means things would get worse even if the population stopped growing, but so far water diversion for people and ag is the main driver. Note the study linked below is 5 years old, so climate change has probably become a bigger factor since when it was published, but it hasn’t changed enough to invalidate the conclusion.
Sounds like the Great Salt Lake is closely following the Salton Sea as they both march consistently towards being like the Aral Sea eco-disaster. Oh Joy! At least we won’t end up with rusting 100’ commercial fishing boats 50 miles from the nearest water.
The article from the New York Times that I linked to upthread suggests Owens Lake as a point of comparison.
From that article–
Of major U.S. cities, Salt Lake has among the lowest per-gallon water rates, according to a 2017 federal report. It also consumes more water for residential use than other desert cities — 96 gallons per person per day last year, compared with 78 in Tucson and 77 in Los Angeles.
The most recent figure that I can find for Colorado Springs is about 74 gallons daily per capita.
However, Salt Lake City has access to year-round mountain water, including several year-round surface creeks, some or most of which are dammed to provide that water. Whereas the lack of water for Los Angeles is legendary, and while I’m not sure if Tucson ever had any perennial sources of water, just looking at the street view of the rivers tells me that even their large rivers are ephemeral nowadays.
I doubt this will be successful.
The Salton Sea was really a very different case. It flooded quickly and dried up quickly, and was much smaller with not much place for the toxic stuff to go, so it crystallized in a really small area. The Salt Lake has been evaporating since the days of Lake Bonneville – the Salt Flats used to be at the bottom of that huge lake (which had been preceded by the even bigger Agassiz Sea). Most of what got left behind is just sea salt. In the newer areas it’s kind of tacky moist white stuff that takes forever to dry out because it reflects sunlight and it also keeps re-adsorbing the water. It’ll be a long time , I think, even at the most pessimistic, before we’re at the stage of heavily toxic precipitation.
But it might get pretty ugly.
New industry.
I’ll wait for the sweet ads in the back of my comic books to return.
I want Seamonkeys, again.
(My first adventure with them was a failure)
Agreed. The Salton Sea was a one-time mistake/disaster surrounded by early industrial agriculture whose toxic runoff was concentrated in the ever-shrinking never-replenishing basin.
GSL was never surrounded by industrial agriculture. And as you say is a remnant of vastly larger ancient pre-ice age lakes. It may be far more concentrated in natural chemicals, alkalis and such, but is far less full of man-made nasties.
The similarity may end with GSL & SS both becoming giant saline dust bowls. With the SS much more toxic/chemically nasty, but GSL much larger in extent. And also much larger in terms of immediately nearby (sub-)urban population to be affected by all that. The environs around SS can hardly become less populated or more economically devastated than they already are. Greater Salt Lake City and it’s satellite cities has rather more to lose.
There may be a 50 or 100 year interval while both lakes transition from stinking ephemeral mud flat through dust bowl to eventually impervious clean hardpan. Those two lakes won’t experience the transition at the same rate, nor during the same years. But it won’t be fun to live nearby either one during the transition whenever and wherever it is.
The problem with the Great Salt Lake is arsenic.
Gift link:
The link should work, even if the preview doesn’t.
Relevant portion from the article:
Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population.
The way the climate is changing, tree ring studies may not mean much in predicting the future.
And then in 2023, massive rain storm in CA.
Yep. But oddly, they keep think of ways to divert water to 'save" that mistake. However, this year, the point is moot.
It is funny, California treats a few inches of rain in a storm the way we in the South-East treat an inch of snow in a storm. (World ending panic.)