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As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces 'An Environmental Nuclear Bomb' (yahoo.com) 304

The state of Utah has the largest saltwater lake in the entire western hemisphere — but it's like the tide went out and never came back, warns the New York Times. [Alternate URL here.]

"If the Great Salt Lake, which has already shrunk by two-thirds, continues to dry up, here's what's in store." The lake's flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.

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. "We have this potential environmental nuclear bomb that's going to go off if we don't take some pretty dramatic action," said Joel Ferry, a Republican state lawmaker and rancher who lives on the north side of the lake.

As climate change continues to cause record-breaking drought, there are no easy solutions. Saving the Great Salt Lake would require letting more snowmelt from the mountains flow to the lake, which means less water for residents and farmers. That would threaten the region's breakneck population growth and high-value agriculture — something state leaders seem reluctant to do. Utah's dilemma raises a core question as the country heats up: How quickly are Americans willing to adapt to the effects of climate change, even as those effects become urgent, obvious, and potentially catastrophic...?

Until recently, that hydrological system existed in a delicate balance... [T]wo changes are throwing that system out of balance. One is explosive population growth, diverting more water from those rivers before they reach the lake. The other shift is climate change, according to Robert Gillies, a professor at Utah State University and Utah's state climatologist. Higher temperatures cause more snowpack to transform to water vapor, which then escapes into the atmosphere, rather than turning to liquid and running into rivers. More heat also means greater demand for water for lawns or crops, further reducing the amount that reaches the lake....

The lake's surface area, which covered about 3,300 square miles in the late 1980s, has since shrunk to less than 1,000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

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As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces 'An Environmental Nuclear Bomb'

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  • by LindleyF ( 9395567 ) on Sunday June 12, 2022 @11:46PM (#62614524)
    It's nice to have green grass but you live in Utah. Go with it.
    • Exactly (Score:5, Interesting)

      by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @12:17AM (#62614576)

      It's nice to have green grass but you live in Utah. Go with it.

      Even before we started having water issues all over, I have despised grass for decades as a horrific waste of resources (not even just water).

      People claim we have water crisis here or there but I will believe none of it until water prices go at least 5x, and grass is at best frowned upon with some areas outright banning.

      That's not even enough probably but it's at least a start to real water consideration, something we do not do at all in any meaningful way right now.

      In the next few years it will be imperative that all water priorities go to crops and drinking water. The earlier we start on that shift the better.

      • Re:Exactly (Score:5, Interesting)

        by gtall ( 79522 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @03:39AM (#62614802)

        You are in luck, you don't have to wait until water prices increase 5x. See

              https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu... [unl.edu]

        The red/brown drought areas have been there for awhile and the American West is now in 22 yr. old drought.

        By the way, prices are a lagging indicator, not a leading one. The Ayn Rand followers will follow her off a cliff before they look around and get nervous because they are falling.

        • by Dusanyu ( 675778 )
          that map states my county is in a drought but yet we have had thunderstorms every other day for the past month and a half. and the river looks high when ride past it.
    • by boxless ( 35756 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @06:15AM (#62614944)

      We bought a house that happened to have a sprinkler system. The wife thought it might be nice to keep the grass green in July and August. I showed her the math. Following industry rules of thumb, it was going to be 10 thousand gallons per month to have a hope in hell of keeping it green. So, We donâ(TM)t ever use the sprinklers and just let it go dormant/brown in July and august. It always comes back in September, because of morning dew and lower temps. So sure, no grass is a great idea, or a lot less grass. And never water. If the never water part doesnâ(TM)t work for you, then no grass is the only alternative.

      • Oh, and for those on wells: itâ(TM)s still a dumb idea and might run afoul of your water districts regulations. Not to sound like a commie, but the water under a town is everyoneâ(TM)s water.

        I once lived in a town where a car wash was being built and the owner thought heâ(TM)d put in a well to eliminate his water bill. The town got wind of it and either killed the idea, or was somehow able to charge him a reduced rate on water, since the town didnâ(TM)t bear the cost of purifying or pum

  • Get all those folks who were going to build Keystone XL and have them build a giant pipe across norcal and Nevada to fill it with seawater.
    • I have to admit the idea crossed my mind too when I clicked on TFA, after reading TFS.

      • by HiThere ( 15173 )

        It's probably an excellent idea (with problems) until you start talking about the cost.

        As others have said, sea water is less salty than the salt-lake is, so add it all at one end, so you keep a gradient, with one stripe remaining about as salty as the current lake. Eventually, of course, you'll end up with a solid block of salt, and then you can cut off chunks and sell them.

    • by jaa101 ( 627731 )

      This will increase the amount of salt in the lake even if the volume of water is maintained or increased. Sea water is less salty than the lake so the first top-up will lower the salinity from what it is now but it will still be saltier than it was when the lake was last at the topped-up level. And next time it evaporates down to the current level it will be saltier than it is now.

      I bet an environmental assessment of the idea will reveal it to be, at best, a long-term time bomb. Adding salt is easy; taki

    • The salt lake is losing water due to reduced rainfall and reduced snowmelt reaching the lake. Fresh water flows into the lake are being redirected elsewhere. The obvious solution is to increase fresh water flows into the lake. Seawater wouldn't fit the bill.

  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @12:00AM (#62614546)
    What did you think 40 years of voting pro austerity Republican candidates was going to get you? When we as a nation face problems that are too big to be solved with free market solutions we no longer have the ability to come together and solve them. Decades of tax cuts, regulation cuts and a general distrust in the government have made it impossible for us to work together and solve challenges that are too big and too unprofitable to leave the businesses.

    The America of today could never even get a rocket off the ground much less land on the Moon if we didn't already have the tech from previous generations who still understood what it means to come together as a nation and solve problems.
    • by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @01:27AM (#62614650)

      When we as a nation face problems that are too big to be solved with free market solutions

      1. Water policy in the American Southwest has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with a "free market". It is based on huge government infrastructure spending plus massive taxpayer-funded subsidies for the biggest wasters.

      2. A free market for water would be a VAST improvement over the current situation. If water was priced-to-market, consumption would be dramatically reduced.

      • by gtall ( 79522 )

        Free markets are lagging "policies" if I can call them policies. They only work to keep an equilibrium in a closed system. The water in the American West is not a closed system. 22 yrs. of drought has not yet brought about conservation because the free market resists accommodating externalities. The free market also doesn't work at the sources of a problem, it only views the results. It is a recipe for disaster because it cannot prevent squat.

      • Don't think you understand what austerity politics are. Austerity politics is when you cut funding to anything that helps working stiffs while increasing subsidies for the 1% and then finally you allow the 1% to do what's called rent seeking off of basic human necessities. It's fascism. In other words the blending of corporate and state institutions.

        If water was priced to market all you would see is rent seeking. You would see companies creating shortages in order to increase profits. That's what happen
    • If by "come together" you mean take my money and give it to somebody else, then, yeah, fuck that.

  • Water Cycle (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Arzaboa ( 2804779 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @12:04AM (#62614552)

    I've been wondering how much of a feedback loop there is in these types of systems with regards to the west drying up.

    If the water in the west wasn't diverted and spread out for fields and lawns, with so much of it being absorbed by the ground that would have otherwise flowed into lakes and ponds, would the west be as dry as it otherwise would be with climate change in such a hurry?

    In this case, the question would be, if the Great Salt Lake was the original size, how would that affect rainfall within 500 miles? How about the temperature?

    I'd have to think that at some level, there is a feedback loop. A big lake would provide moisture for evaporation, which would then fall in the mountains 'around' that lake. How much does this affect the local climate? Would a larger lake bring down the temperatures surrounding the lake?

    I wouldn't think it would be anything close to offset the overall effects of climate change and reduced precipitation, but, how does this affect the overall timing, severity and duration of these cycles?

    Do we have anyone about to write a grad paper that would like to chime in, or share some results?

    --
    Thousands have lived without love, not one without water. - W. H. Auden

  • It is parody to real life.
    We all know the world is now doing fairly well, but it is going to shit if we do not act within the century.
    Yet nobody really cares about that.
    • Why should the people that have the power? They'll be dead in 20-30 years, and nothing too bad will happen before that.

      Sure, it may get hotter in some places, but they can afford air conditioning. And food will get more expensive, but they can afford that. So why bother doing anything?

  • I have a hard time believing that's due to anthropogenic global warming - it's way too drastic a change over way too short an interval. Now if you said it was caused by other human actions... I could easily believe that, but you'd have to provide sufficient believable detail.

    Wait... let's go look at some easy-to-find data.Wikipedia states the lake's size has fluctuated greatly over time. 1980 was a historical peak at 3300 square miles; 1963 set a previous historic low of 950 square miles. Back in 1873 it wa

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Dj Stingray ( 178766 )

      Where are you getting "global warming"? Nowhere in the summary or the Yahoo! article (I don't have a Times subscription) mentioned the word "warming". Even in the summary they said one of the culprits is population growth.

      • Where are you getting "global warming"? Nowhere in the summary or the Yahoo! article (I don't have a Times subscription) mentioned the word "warming". Even in the summary they said one of the culprits is population growth.

        It's pretty clear to me (I live in Utah) that it's both. It's population growth combined with a long, severe drought that is looking less like a drought and more like aridification; climate change making this part of the Mountain West -- which is already a high desert -- hotter and drier than before. That we're likely seeing permanent aridification is the general consensus among regional climatologists and geologists.

        Population growth by itself is probably enough to account for some reduction in lake leve

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by tempo36 ( 2382592 )

      Looks like someone didn't RTFA.

      Go back, then read, then return and apologize.

  • by jargonburn ( 1950578 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @12:53AM (#62614618)
    Oh, my!
    $Deity forbid that mitigating an entirely predictable environmental catastrophe of their own making "threaten the region's breakneck population growth and high-value agriculture"!
    They'll need a lot of help, so I'm sending thoughts and prayers!
  • [quote]which means less water for residents and farmers. That would threaten the region's breakneck population growth and high-value agriculture[/quote] Why do you think there is a breakneck population growth? Because you facilitate it by diverting water from nature to your cultured environment. Stop doing that and let people settle in more hospitable areas.
  • It's time to mine some salt and arsenic before the wind blows it away!

  • Every conservative / republican probably.

    And now they want those commie scientists to fix their problems.

    How the turn tables. /s

  • "That would threaten the region's breakneck population growth and high-value agriculture..."

    It sounds like those things are threatened anyway. The question is do you manage it or just let an environmental catastrophe unfold.

  • Is this a pottery thing?
    • by suss ( 158993 )

      This is a "I can't be bothered to spellcheck my submissions"-thing, even though i have the word "Editor" in my chosen alias. It happens quite often.

      Yours truly,
      Bobba Fett.

      • It's spelled correctly. Editor means more than spellchecking, but perhaps not in modern usage.
        • It is spelled incorrectly.
          The fact that the misspelling of a word happens to match the spelling of another word does not mean that the former is spelt correctly.

          Slashdot "Editors" should be ashamed of the awful job they do.

  • "We can have eternal growth with finite resources", "I don't believe in climate change".

    They can hold on to those beliefs as they choke to death on a cloud of arsenic or watch everything around them dry up, screaming that it isn't true.

    Reality will persist.

  • by Sethra ( 55187 ) on Monday June 13, 2022 @11:14AM (#62615660)

    That lake has been drying up for the last 11,000 years and was originally part of a massive lake called Lake Bonneville another 20,000 years earlier. When humans settled into that area the lake was already on the decline.
      There is no doubt that urban water demands have exacerbated the demise of the lake, but it would have naturally dried up sooner or later.

    Climate change caused this? Almost certainly, but that has been going on LONG before humans were around. Normal climate fluctuations are responsible for it's formation in the first place.

    Things change naturally, you don't need a boogeyman to explain it.

If you steal from one author it's plagiarism; if you steal from many it's research. -- Wilson Mizner

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