For years, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere has sprawled across northern Utah, and while its size fluctuates due to its shallowness, the extreme drought gripping the western United States today could become the death of the iconic body of water.
More than 93 percent of the land in seven Western states is in drought conditions, and nearly 59 percent of the area is experiencing extreme or exceptional drought -the two worst conditions – according to figures released by the U.S. Drought Monitor.
And with the severity of the drought in Utah, The Great Salt Lake is expected to reach a 170-year low, and this is on top of the record fire conditions that have already created fires across Utah and the other Western states.
The receding waters of the lake will have a far-reaching effect on not just the region’s ecosystem, but wildlife and human lives as well. And these issues could become very relevant if the lake turns to dust.
This one issue is very concerning for The Deseret News. It is reporting that the Great Salt Lake’s volume has dropped 50 percent overall, and the lake is drying up quickly.
The Great Salt Lake: A remnant of a much bigger lake
The Great Salt Lake is the largest lake in the United States that is not part of the Great Lakes region. It is actually the remnants of Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric lake that covered a good part of western Utah until about 16,800 years ago, when a large portion of the lake was released through the Red Rock Pass in Idaho, causing cataclysmic flooding.
To give readers an idea of how big Lake Bonneville was – today, the Great Salt Lake covers an area of approximately 1,700 square miles (4,400 square kilometers). It has an average depth of about 16 ft (4.9 meters).
Lake Bonneville, on the other hand, spanned 22,400 square miles (58,000 square kilometers), nearly as large as present-day Lake Michigan, and had an average depth of 923 ft (281 meters).
Today, the Great Salt Lake is fed by three main tributaries, the Jordan, Weber, and Bear rivers. Between them, they deposit 1.1 million tons of minerals in the lake each year. And because the lake has no outlets, this results in the lake having very high salinity levels, much higher than ocean water.
And even though the lake has been occasionally called “America’s Dead Sea,” the lake provides a habitat for millions of birds, including shorebirds and waterfowl, and supports a brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana) industry that supplies 35 to 45 percent of the worldwide supply.
Man’s interference has not helped
Besides the horrific drought conditions, man has not helped the lake. People for years have been diverting water from rivers that flow into the lake to water crops and supply homes. Because the lake is shallow – less water quickly translates to receding shorelines.
Those dry shorelines, coated with a covering crust of minerals are full of naturally occurring arsenic, and when dust storms whip up across those shorelines, a broken crust can spread the pollution for miles.
More exposed lakebed also means more people have ventured onto the crust, including off-road vehicles that damage it, Great Salt Lake coordinator Laura Vernon said.
“The more continued drought we have, the more of the salt crust will be weathered and more dust will become airborne because there’s less of that protective crust layer,” she said.
The swirling dust also could speed the melting of Utah’s snow, according to research by McKenzie Skiles, a snow hydrologist at the University of Utah. And that will just continue the cycle of early snowmelt in the region, feeding into the lack of water.
