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Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse

232 points by Kaibeezy 4y ago

ianbutler 4y ago
Maybe because I can conceptualize "in 5 years" a lot easier than some other ecological disasters we have ongoing on the scale of "in 100 years" but I found reading this to have a more profound impact on me than other pleas. Hopefully it will have the same impact on those in charge.
- nerdponx 4y ago
  Sounds like it's basically too late already unless Utah pulls the e-brake on water use.
londons_explore 4y ago
Luckily the rename will be easy. We just change maps from "Great Salt Lake" to "Great Salt Plains".
- barbazoo 4y ago
  This is not a lake created by a dam, is it? It seems to have existed for thousands of years so I don't get the implication that this lake is returning to it's former state. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake
  - brudgers 4y ago
    Yes, the Great Salt Lake is an effect of an endorheic watershed.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Well, it kinda is - if the dam is ‘the mountains’. It’s trapped by geology. It’s varied from ‘nothing’ to ‘massive inland lake larger than most states’ over 10’s and hundreds of thousands of years.
- irrational 4y ago
  What dam? Are you thinking of Lake Powell on the border of Utah and Arizona?
- monkaiju 4y ago
  The GSL wasn't formed from a dam. Its the remnants of Lake Bonneville
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  Salt flats all over the place in that basin. Once were lakes. “Great Salt Flat” seems most likely.
jimmar 4y ago
Utah settlers took pride in making the "desert blossom as a rose" [1]. In new developments you can drive by lush green lawns, and see the natural, arid land on the lots right next to those lawns. It's going to take a massive cultural shift for people in Utah to take this seriously. They have to embrace the desert and stop trying to turn Utah into one gigantic, English garden. [1] https://zionnationalpark.com/zion-national-park/the-desert-shall-blossom/#:~:text=To%20Utah's%20first%20non%2Dnative,maintaining%20a%20grand%20vision%20through https://zionnationalpark.com/zion-national-park/the-desert-s...
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I've only been in the SLC area, but this is my observation as well -- I saw a lot of lush gardening and extensive "beautifying" water use, including to ridiculous ends (the parking lot of the hotel I was in flooded because they couldn't be bothered to put the sprinklers on a schedule). Combined with an extractive rather than preservative agricultural tradition, it doesn't bode well for Utah's future.
  - butlerm 4y ago
    Utah is working on metering all urban secondary water use (sprinklers) where traditionally it has been unmetered leading to waste.
- marze 4y ago
  Reducing residential water use is a nice symbolic gesture, but the vast majority of available water is used to grow alfalfa and a few other crops. Symbolic gestures are good, but careful analysis and appropriate changes are needed to really make a difference.
  - Sevii 4y ago
    85% of water use in Utah goes to agriculture but people focus on lawns because they can see them. Most water issues in the west are caused by contracts made back when nobody lived there and there was tons of water to go around. Now those contracts are in effect a water subsidy to legacy agricultural interests.
woodruffw 4y ago
A key claim: > Depending on future weather conditions, achieving this level of flow will require cutting consumptive water use in the Great Salt Lake watershed by a third to a half. Recent efforts have returned less than 0.1 million acre-feet per year to the lake with most conserved water held in reservoirs or delivered to other users rather than released to the lake.
newaccount2021 4y ago
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csharpminor 4y ago
There are many reasons this is bad, but personally I find the arsenic release to be the scariest. If I were starting a family in SLC I would be thinking hard about if it’s where I want to stay long term. Really hope the policymakers are able to find a path forward here.
- lost_tourist 4y ago
  Arsenic release is more scary than running completely out of water? Both are solved by the same mechanism, water conservation and prioritization over profits of 3% of the farmers. Seems like a no-brainer, but right wing christian conservatives in Utah won't realize that until it's too late.
  - csharpminor 4y ago
    Where does the report say that lake collapse would cause the region to completely run out of water?
fzeroracer 4y ago
Unfortunately, I doubt they'll take any sort of actual action to fix the problem. Most of the water is used for agriculture and a significant voting bloc that will block any solutions that involve water rationing or reducing. The local government being entirely in the pocket of business-oriented Republicans also means they're not likely to do anything that would significantly affect the bottom line of agricultural businesses. Or anything that would affect the middle upper class that uses a lot of cheap water for their gardens and what not. So I don't see much hope for this until the storms of toxic dust from the now empty lakebed spur people into action. By then though it'll be too late.
hnbear 4y ago
“…driving salinity to levels incompatible with the lake’s food webs” - this is a fantastic was of saying everything will die. Although in a doc titled “Emergency Measures Needed” it might more useful to have less euphemism.
- Kaibeezy 4y ago
  The title of the CNN article that alerted me to this paper is: Great Salt Lake will disappear in 5 years without massive ‘emergency rescue,’ scientists say That’s a lot more blunt. Is “will disappear” editorial? I’d be OK with that one as an academic journal EIC. It’s a variously slippery/tractive surface, sloped in many directions. ETA: I’m puzzled how my comment above is a detriment to conversation. If you see it differently, why not engage?
  - shampto3 4y ago
    > Is "will disappear" editorial? It's not editorial - it's lifted from the report: > If this rate of water loss continues, the lake would be on track to disappear in the next five years.
- lazide 4y ago
  It’s quite a lot of extra salinity too considering it’s already the great salt lake, and more salty than the oceans.
thenerdhead 4y ago
One of the things you learn about Utah history is prehistoric Lake Bonneville which used to cover majority of Utah. The Great Salt Lake is the remnant of it and many of the popular tourist attractions have names representing the high shoreline as it continued to lower in its regression phase. Ever since I was a kid I was taught that the Great Salt Lake would eventually dry up(not in my lifetime). But each year I lived there and would drive by or fly in a small plane across it, I would see more flats and less water. Just last June I visited and much of Utah seemingly is becoming a dust bowl. I think it is way too late to save it. But we will see plenty of people point fingers at those in charge today, those growing crops, and residential usage when the reality is that this was hardly talked about in terms of sustainability decades ago when it was at its highest. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea
- tremon 4y ago
  I think you're right. I was struck by this line in the article: > The choices we make over the next few months will affect our state and ecosystems throughout the West for decades to come That's a big bag of wishful thinking. What they're actually saying is "the choices we have made over the past decades have effected the current state of the ecosystems in this area, and there's only a few months left to undo those decisions."
  - mysterydip 4y ago
    Reminds me a bit of football games where one team plays poorly the whole game, then complains they lost because the kicker missed an impossibly long field goal on the last play of the game.
- troyvit 4y ago
  This reminds me of another recent news story where the state of Kansas finally admitted that a) their plan had always been to completely drain the Ogallala aquifer and b) as of December 2022 maybe that wasn't the best plan. https://kansasreflector.com/2022/12/15/its-time-to-deal-with-this-kansas-water-authority-wants-to-save-ogallala-aquifer/ https://kansasreflector.com/2022/12/15/its-time-to-deal-with...
Planktonne 4y ago
> We recommend setting an emergency streamflow requirement of at least 2.5 million acre-feet per year until the lake reaches its minimum healthy elevation of 4,198 feet Targeting recovery at reaching - not even sustaining - the minimum level just means that the problem will continually reoccur.
- lazide 4y ago
  It’s a bit like setting a budget target at at ‘doesn’t hemorrhage cash’. Better than ‘rapidly increasing flood of red ink’ I guess?
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. If Utah pulls back from the brink, possibly there is hope for other situations too.
deet 4y ago
As a recent transplant from California to Utah, watching the discussions of this situation play out locally has been interesting. If water were well managed here, the area is potentially blessed over the long term compared to most of the West because there are large amounts of precipitation that fall on the nearby Wasatch and Uinta mountains. These mountains and their snow melt combined with the Great Sale Lake form a somewhat contained water cycle. It's a different situation than most southwestern metro areas (Vegas, Phoenix, LA) that rely on distant sources like the Colorado river, and the problems northern Utah faces are more amenable to local solutions. The culture of water use in the urban areas really is surprising compared to say, Southern California or Arizona. There is plenty of water wasted, little restrictions on sprinkler use, etc. This is changing though and many of my neighbors are visibly switching to more sustainable landscaping, with local government incentives. However, urban water use is not the problem even if it's what people see every day. The cities do not really need to stop growing (as a NYT piece earlier this year seemed to suggest). The urban areas account for only 9% of diverted water (per the report). The problem seems to be agriculture and trying to grow water-intensive crops in the arid areas west the Wasatch range. 74% of the diverted water is going to agriculture, and cutting that usage by 50% would basically meet the cited amount needed to restore the lake. At this point, it seems to be just a political problem: can the state find the political willpower to force conservation on or buy-out the water rights of the agricultural sector? I'm hopeful. Although the agricultural sector seems to have plenty of political power historically, other local industries have been growing far faster in economic influence and maintaining the health of the cities will hopefully take priority.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  The solution is not restrictions or force. Simply raise the price of the water. The rest will sort itself out.
  - suresk 4y ago
    This has been happening for commercial/residential cases, but most agriculture is based on water shares - a right to a certain amount of water that someone purchased a long time ago, so you can't really raise the price on them. One solution I've seen kicked around is spending a bunch of money to buy back those shares at well above market rates to conserve the water.
akiselev 4y ago
The Great Salt Lake is starting to look like the Salton sea [1] which is considered the largest environmental catastrophe in California history. If this keeps going SLC may quickly become unlivable. I still remember the smell in the LA basin when the winds blew from the Sea and it was awful - think that smell around large colonies of seabirds with a tinge of death. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea
- scythe 4y ago
  The Salton Sea, however, is unnatural. Before humans interfered, it was just a dry valley. It was never sustainable, regardless of the usage pattern or climate trajectory.
  - giraffe_lady 4y ago
    Wasn't it one of the two end-points the colorado used to alternate between? When it was draining that way it was there, and when it flipped every few decades or centuries it wasn't. There's not ever a firm line between "natural" and "after humans interfered" as if those are separate, unrelated and incompatible things. But in this case it is particularly fuzzy.
    - s1artibartfast 4y ago
      I think the switching occured much less frequently, with the lake drawing down and drying in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Cahuilla#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Cahuilla#History The lake existed in several stages over the last 2,000 years, periodically drying and refilling and eventually disappearing sometime after 1580. Between 1905 and 1907, due to an engineering accident, the Salton Sea formed in parts of the lower basin of Lake Cahuilla. Were it not for human intervention, the sea might have grown to the size of prehistoric Lake Cahuilla.
    - scythe 4y ago
      When the Colorado flowed into that valley, it also flowed out through the Hardy River, with the exit near Nuevo Leon. The metastable state that existed then inundated most of what is now the Imperial Valley; the city of Mexicali (pop ~1M) would be underwater.
sparrish 4y ago
Using a satellite photo from 1985 to show how far the lake has receded is disingenuous. I was there in 1985. My father was working with hundreds of others to build dikes to stop the lake from flooding the city. Probably shouldn't be using a flood picture as the 'before' photo.
- deleted 4y ago
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- dendrite9 4y ago
  Was that when the pumps were built on the Nevada border to get water out of the drainage if needed? The shallowness of the lake makes it different to think about than lake most people are used to. It is more of a big puddle, as a kid being told it was ~30 feet deep at the deepest was hard to believe since I was used to smaller lakes deeper than 100 feet. The idea that the lake could drain seems scary to me since the lake effect helps to increase the amount of snow in the Wasatch. Without the lake, would the Wasatch front look like other basins to the West? It is worth noting that the Salt lake drainage basin is closed but through the Central Utah Project some of the Colorado basin water is claimed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Utah_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Utah_Project This summer I listened to an interview with a guy who paddled around the lake, it was interesting to hear since so much of the lake was more theoretical to me than real. Getting to the edge of the water in many parts wasn't possible or wasn't easy. https://bendingbranches.com/blogs/resources/kayaking-on-great-salt-lake-utah https://bendingbranches.com/blogs/resources/kayaking-on-grea... https://radiowest.kuer.org/agriculture-and-the-environment/2021-10-08/the-state-and-fate-of-the-great-salt-lake-part-ii https://radiowest.kuer.org/agriculture-and-the-environment/2... Sorry, not all this was aimed at you but I figured I'd condense some thoughts into a single reply.
  - butlerm 4y ago
    Yes, the pumps were built in the late 1980s and are still maintained, but have never been used for much of anything since then. I believe they ran for about two years. Also, the western edge of the lake (where the pumps are) is still about sixty miles from the Nevada border. Lots of empty salt flats to pump water on top of if that becomes necessary again someday. I believe the general consensus is that the lake effect is marginal at best in terms of total precipitation received in the area.
candrewlee14 4y ago
Ending alfalfa farming would likely help a lot. The water usage is insane for such a small part of Utah’s GDP.
- malandrew 4y ago
  If it’s so little of GDP, it shouldn’t be hard to make a reasonable off to buy out the water rights.
  - elliotec 4y ago
    That’s the hope. The struggle is how stubborn people are.
moloch-hai 4y ago
They just need to float solar farms on it. Those will cut evaporation. Likewise, the Aral Sea. But the main problem is stealing water from rivers feeding it. If they don't get a handle on that, nothing else can help much. There is no substitute for sound governance. Unfortunately, Utah is in the grip of a commitment to bad governance as officially advertised policy. I don't know how you get back from that.
BuffaloBagel 4y ago
Utahn here. We don't have a water problem so much as we have an alfalfa problem. It consumes most of our water with very little economic benefit to the state as a whole.
- moloch-hai 4y ago
  Likewise, California: alfalfa and almonds, with a side of pomegranates.
goldmint 4y ago
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fallingfrog 4y ago
Along with Lake Mead, the ogalla aquifer.. That whole area is turning from semi-arid to desert. Time to start moving people away. If I was in charge of those areas, I'd start by buying up and closing farms in order to perform a controlled shutdown of the agricultural sector in those states. The people would leave on their own without the industry there. Without agriculture, the water inputs and outputs would be balanced, at least for the present. There really isn't a choice here between shutting down agriculture in the southwest vs not shutting it down. The only choice is between doing it in a planned, gradual way, or in an unplanned, chaotic way. Do you want this plane to crash, or do you want it to land?
ck2 4y ago
Will it kill less than a million people? Because we've already seen the lack of response when a million die, we start working on the next million.
deleted 4y ago
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CyanLite2 4y ago
Dumb question: could we build a big pipeline from the Pacific Coast and just pump billions (trillions?) of gallons of ocean water to the Great Salt Lake?
- masklinn 4y ago
  > just pump billions (trillions?) of gallons The deficit is ~1.5 million acre-feet. That's 488 000 000 000 gallons / year. Or 1.3 billion gallons per day. As far as I'm aware, the largest pipeline in the US has around 1/10th that capacity (Colonial has a capacity of 3 million barrels or 126 million gallons a day). Also pumping that much from the pacific would likely annihilate whatever's on the other end of that pipe.
  - gremlinsinc 4y ago
    What if we built a huge gulf basically down the plains just on the other side of the rocky's so basically there's a gulf splitting America into two completely by waters from the artic ocean or north pacific, I'm talking we dissect all the way north through canada all the way down through mexico etc. This would maybe create new weather patterns, in combination we'd need to plant LOTS of trees which also creates weather patterns to change, but we could terraform the utah desert to be more like the midwest, but it would be defense-budget costly to do so, but if it worked it could be worth it.
georgewinters 4y ago
FWIW, the snowpack this season is well above average: https://www.ksl.com/weather/snowpack https://www.ksl.com/weather/snowpack
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  If you have 5x 8oz cups that are only 25% full, and you add enough water to fill up the 5th cup so that its 100% full, you've still got 24oz of water missing, that needs to catch up. I.e. one good year, won't fix 10 bad ones. Not even close. No offense, but it's worth very little, and is an outlier the future doesn't hold well for this being a 'trend', especially as we enter el nino next year where ocean temps rise, and the west enters a dryer period.
garbagecoder 4y ago
This is what they voted for.
denvaar 4y ago
I live in Salt Lake and most of the time when I mention this issue to friends or family it isn't even on their radar, but this is likely going to cause my wife and I to move somewhere else. It's too bad because this is such a great place to live and its where our family is at. We usually have a really bad inversion in the winter time, and it seems like the summers for the last few years have been filled with wildfire smoke. I'm sick of constantly worrying about the quality of the air I am breathing.
- codazoda 4y ago
  I'm also from North of SLC. I once read that this area was originally called Smokey Valley by Native American tribes that roamed the area but who usually avoided the valley because of the smoke pollution. It has something to do with how air moves through the area protected by the mountains and the lake. That was before the industrial revolution. I'm sure that the quality of that smoke has degraded with the burning of fossil fuels, but it is interesting that the area has been known as the "smokey valley" for at least a couple hundred years.
  - illumin8 4y ago
    Salt Lake County, Weber County, and Utah County all suffer from inversions during cold weather months, which is much of the winter. Inversions are where a layer of warm air traps cold, polluted air inside the valley and air pollution accumulates because it can't go anywhere. I grew up in Utah county and I remember the Geneva steel plant was a huge source of pollution. In my environmental studies class we calculated that on cold weather days when there was an inversion the amount of pollution each person breathed every day was equivalent to smoking 3 cigarettes. Even before internal combustion engines and modern industry the campfires alone must have given Utah valleys the reputation as "smokey valley" by the native Americans. This is not a new phenomenon - the geography of high mountains with lots of population causing pollution in the valleys causes it naturally.
    - butlerm 4y ago
      Geneva Steel in Utah County was constructed for World War II steel production, but fortunately has been closed and its site remediated for a couple of decades now.
NorthOf33rd 4y ago
The reality is that Utah is a theocracy, and BYU (the LDS Church) publishing this is actually a huge step toward positive change. Now the First Presidency can take a stand. If they do take a strong stand I'd expect to see radical changes. If, on the other hand, the LDS Church continues to remain silent, I would expect the environmental catastrophe to continue to lurch forward.
- sphars 4y ago
  They also made a statement last year[1], about needing to conserve water a lot more and be responsible. They've also taken the steps to reduce water usage at their facilities and allow grounds to become brown and dormant, and use better solutions for future use. A lot of the buildings in my area stopped watering the lawns (I live in Utah). It's not much but a step in the right direction. [1]: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/drought-water-conservation-statement https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/drought-wat...
- butlerm 4y ago
  You could hardly make a less informed statement than to compare Utah to a theocracy. The LDS church is influential, but as an organization neither cares about nor has a position about nor preaches to its members about the vast majority of political issues. There are only a handful of well known exceptions - the LDS church leadership does not want to be involved in politics at all and they only do so reluctantly.
  - NorthOf33rd 4y ago
    yes that is their official policy but surprise, they don’t do as they preach https://www.kuer.org/politics/2015-04-06/carl-wimmer-opens-up-about-lds-church-utah-legislature-relations?_amp=true https://www.kuer.org/politics/2015-04-06/carl-wimmer-opens-u... https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/08/04/former-utah-senator-criticizes-secretive-puppet-string-lobbying-by-mormon-church/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/08/04/former-utah-... Those are two examples behind closed doors. Other legislators don’t want to excommunication, so they’ll never speak up. And then there’s the times the church has made direct public statements or direct cash contributions to political causes like gay marriage in Utah or prop 8 in California. 70% of Utahans listen to a living prophet who shapes their ethics, morality and world view. If you think politics ends at the state house doors or at the ballot box you’re sorely mistaken. In 2016 the first presidency published a letter urging members to vote, and vote with their morals. The church and the living prophet dictate their morals. It’s a pretty straight line. It’s a theocracy, the church always gets what it wants. The U.S. government has turned its cannons against the state house because it recognized that it was a theocracy. The organization and methods have changed significantly since then, but the people in power have not.
grapescheesee 4y ago
Water resources are the ultimate control vector. Its not parties, or states, its power. It is very real how little is being done, and scapegoats are everywhere.
SergeAx 4y ago
Wow, America made it again. I thought I know all the esoteric units, and still here I am. For all poor souls like me: one acre-foot is 1233 cubic meters.
illumin8 4y ago
This was an incredible statistic I noticed in the article: > Air pollution already causes 1-in-5 deaths globally—around 12.1 million premature deaths annually. Is this accurate?

232 points by Kaibeezy 4y ago

Maybe because I can conceptualize "in 5 years" a lot easier than some other ecological disasters we have ongoing on the scale of "in 100 years" but I found reading this to have a more profound impact on me than other pleas. Hopefully it will have the same impact on those in charge.

nerdponx 4y ago
Sounds like it's basically too late already unless Utah pulls the e-brake on water use.

londons_explore 4y ago

Luckily the rename will be easy. We just change maps from "Great Salt Lake" to "Great Salt Plains".

barbazoo 4y ago
This is not a lake created by a dam, is it? It seems to have existed for thousands of years so I don't get the implication that this lake is returning to it's former state. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Salt_Lake
- brudgers 4y ago
  Yes, the Great Salt Lake is an effect of an endorheic watershed.
- lazide 4y ago
  Well, it kinda is - if the dam is ‘the mountains’. It’s trapped by geology. It’s varied from ‘nothing’ to ‘massive inland lake larger than most states’ over 10’s and hundreds of thousands of years.
irrational 4y ago
What dam? Are you thinking of Lake Powell on the border of Utah and Arizona?
monkaiju 4y ago
The GSL wasn't formed from a dam. Its the remnants of Lake Bonneville
Kaibeezy 4y ago
Salt flats all over the place in that basin. Once were lakes. “Great Salt Flat” seems most likely.

jimmar 4y ago

Utah settlers took pride in making the "desert blossom as a rose" [1]. In new developments you can drive by lush green lawns, and see the natural, arid land on the lots right next to those lawns. It's going to take a massive cultural shift for people in Utah to take this seriously. They have to embrace the desert and stop trying to turn Utah into one gigantic, English garden. [1] https://zionnationalpark.com/zion-national-park/the-desert-shall-blossom/#:~:text=To%20Utah's%20first%20non%2Dnative,maintaining%20a%20grand%20vision%20through https://zionnationalpark.com/zion-national-park/the-desert-s...

woodruffw 4y ago
I've only been in the SLC area, but this is my observation as well -- I saw a lot of lush gardening and extensive "beautifying" water use, including to ridiculous ends (the parking lot of the hotel I was in flooded because they couldn't be bothered to put the sprinklers on a schedule). Combined with an extractive rather than preservative agricultural tradition, it doesn't bode well for Utah's future.
- butlerm 4y ago
  Utah is working on metering all urban secondary water use (sprinklers) where traditionally it has been unmetered leading to waste.
marze 4y ago
Reducing residential water use is a nice symbolic gesture, but the vast majority of available water is used to grow alfalfa and a few other crops. Symbolic gestures are good, but careful analysis and appropriate changes are needed to really make a difference.
- Sevii 4y ago
  85% of water use in Utah goes to agriculture but people focus on lawns because they can see them. Most water issues in the west are caused by contracts made back when nobody lived there and there was tons of water to go around. Now those contracts are in effect a water subsidy to legacy agricultural interests.

woodruffw 4y ago

A key claim: > Depending on future weather conditions, achieving this level of flow will require cutting consumptive water use in the Great Salt Lake watershed by a third to a half. Recent efforts have returned less than 0.1 million acre-feet per year to the lake with most conserved water held in reservoirs or delivered to other users rather than released to the lake.

newaccount2021 4y ago

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csharpminor 4y ago

There are many reasons this is bad, but personally I find the arsenic release to be the scariest. If I were starting a family in SLC I would be thinking hard about if it’s where I want to stay long term. Really hope the policymakers are able to find a path forward here.

lost_tourist 4y ago
Arsenic release is more scary than running completely out of water? Both are solved by the same mechanism, water conservation and prioritization over profits of 3% of the farmers. Seems like a no-brainer, but right wing christian conservatives in Utah won't realize that until it's too late.
- csharpminor 4y ago
  Where does the report say that lake collapse would cause the region to completely run out of water?

fzeroracer 4y ago

Unfortunately, I doubt they'll take any sort of actual action to fix the problem. Most of the water is used for agriculture and a significant voting bloc that will block any solutions that involve water rationing or reducing. The local government being entirely in the pocket of business-oriented Republicans also means they're not likely to do anything that would significantly affect the bottom line of agricultural businesses. Or anything that would affect the middle upper class that uses a lot of cheap water for their gardens and what not. So I don't see much hope for this until the storms of toxic dust from the now empty lakebed spur people into action. By then though it'll be too late.

hnbear 4y ago

“…driving salinity to levels incompatible with the lake’s food webs” - this is a fantastic was of saying everything will die. Although in a doc titled “Emergency Measures Needed” it might more useful to have less euphemism.

Kaibeezy 4y ago
The title of the CNN article that alerted me to this paper is: Great Salt Lake will disappear in 5 years without massive ‘emergency rescue,’ scientists say That’s a lot more blunt. Is “will disappear” editorial? I’d be OK with that one as an academic journal EIC. It’s a variously slippery/tractive surface, sloped in many directions. ETA: I’m puzzled how my comment above is a detriment to conversation. If you see it differently, why not engage?
- shampto3 4y ago
  > Is "will disappear" editorial? It's not editorial - it's lifted from the report: > If this rate of water loss continues, the lake would be on track to disappear in the next five years.
lazide 4y ago
It’s quite a lot of extra salinity too considering it’s already the great salt lake, and more salty than the oceans.

thenerdhead 4y ago

One of the things you learn about Utah history is prehistoric Lake Bonneville which used to cover majority of Utah. The Great Salt Lake is the remnant of it and many of the popular tourist attractions have names representing the high shoreline as it continued to lower in its regression phase. Ever since I was a kid I was taught that the Great Salt Lake would eventually dry up(not in my lifetime). But each year I lived there and would drive by or fly in a small plane across it, I would see more flats and less water. Just last June I visited and much of Utah seemingly is becoming a dust bowl. I think it is way too late to save it. But we will see plenty of people point fingers at those in charge today, those growing crops, and residential usage when the reality is that this was hardly talked about in terms of sustainability decades ago when it was at its highest. Also see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

tremon 4y ago
I think you're right. I was struck by this line in the article: > The choices we make over the next few months will affect our state and ecosystems throughout the West for decades to come That's a big bag of wishful thinking. What they're actually saying is "the choices we have made over the past decades have effected the current state of the ecosystems in this area, and there's only a few months left to undo those decisions."
- mysterydip 4y ago
  Reminds me a bit of football games where one team plays poorly the whole game, then complains they lost because the kicker missed an impossibly long field goal on the last play of the game.
troyvit 4y ago
This reminds me of another recent news story where the state of Kansas finally admitted that a) their plan had always been to completely drain the Ogallala aquifer and b) as of December 2022 maybe that wasn't the best plan. https://kansasreflector.com/2022/12/15/its-time-to-deal-with-this-kansas-water-authority-wants-to-save-ogallala-aquifer/ https://kansasreflector.com/2022/12/15/its-time-to-deal-with...

Planktonne 4y ago

> We recommend setting an emergency streamflow requirement of at least 2.5 million acre-feet per year until the lake reaches its minimum healthy elevation of 4,198 feet Targeting recovery at reaching - not even sustaining - the minimum level just means that the problem will continually reoccur.

lazide 4y ago
It’s a bit like setting a budget target at at ‘doesn’t hemorrhage cash’. Better than ‘rapidly increasing flood of red ink’ I guess?

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. If Utah pulls back from the brink, possibly there is hope for other situations too.

deet 4y ago

As a recent transplant from California to Utah, watching the discussions of this situation play out locally has been interesting. If water were well managed here, the area is potentially blessed over the long term compared to most of the West because there are large amounts of precipitation that fall on the nearby Wasatch and Uinta mountains. These mountains and their snow melt combined with the Great Sale Lake form a somewhat contained water cycle. It's a different situation than most southwestern metro areas (Vegas, Phoenix, LA) that rely on distant sources like the Colorado river, and the problems northern Utah faces are more amenable to local solutions. The culture of water use in the urban areas really is surprising compared to say, Southern California or Arizona. There is plenty of water wasted, little restrictions on sprinkler use, etc. This is changing though and many of my neighbors are visibly switching to more sustainable landscaping, with local government incentives. However, urban water use is not the problem even if it's what people see every day. The cities do not really need to stop growing (as a NYT piece earlier this year seemed to suggest). The urban areas account for only 9% of diverted water (per the report). The problem seems to be agriculture and trying to grow water-intensive crops in the arid areas west the Wasatch range. 74% of the diverted water is going to agriculture, and cutting that usage by 50% would basically meet the cited amount needed to restore the lake. At this point, it seems to be just a political problem: can the state find the political willpower to force conservation on or buy-out the water rights of the agricultural sector? I'm hopeful. Although the agricultural sector seems to have plenty of political power historically, other local industries have been growing far faster in economic influence and maintaining the health of the cities will hopefully take priority.

WalterBright 4y ago
The solution is not restrictions or force. Simply raise the price of the water. The rest will sort itself out.
- suresk 4y ago
  This has been happening for commercial/residential cases, but most agriculture is based on water shares - a right to a certain amount of water that someone purchased a long time ago, so you can't really raise the price on them. One solution I've seen kicked around is spending a bunch of money to buy back those shares at well above market rates to conserve the water.

akiselev 4y ago

The Great Salt Lake is starting to look like the Salton sea [1] which is considered the largest environmental catastrophe in California history. If this keeps going SLC may quickly become unlivable. I still remember the smell in the LA basin when the winds blew from the Sea and it was awful - think that smell around large colonies of seabirds with a tinge of death. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salton_Sea

scythe 4y ago
The Salton Sea, however, is unnatural. Before humans interfered, it was just a dry valley. It was never sustainable, regardless of the usage pattern or climate trajectory.
- giraffe_lady 4y ago
  Wasn't it one of the two end-points the colorado used to alternate between? When it was draining that way it was there, and when it flipped every few decades or centuries it wasn't. There's not ever a firm line between "natural" and "after humans interfered" as if those are separate, unrelated and incompatible things. But in this case it is particularly fuzzy.
  - s1artibartfast 4y ago
    I think the switching occured much less frequently, with the lake drawing down and drying in between. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Cahuilla#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Cahuilla#History The lake existed in several stages over the last 2,000 years, periodically drying and refilling and eventually disappearing sometime after 1580. Between 1905 and 1907, due to an engineering accident, the Salton Sea formed in parts of the lower basin of Lake Cahuilla. Were it not for human intervention, the sea might have grown to the size of prehistoric Lake Cahuilla.
  - scythe 4y ago
    When the Colorado flowed into that valley, it also flowed out through the Hardy River, with the exit near Nuevo Leon. The metastable state that existed then inundated most of what is now the Imperial Valley; the city of Mexicali (pop ~1M) would be underwater.

sparrish 4y ago

Using a satellite photo from 1985 to show how far the lake has receded is disingenuous. I was there in 1985. My father was working with hundreds of others to build dikes to stop the lake from flooding the city. Probably shouldn't be using a flood picture as the 'before' photo.

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dendrite9 4y ago
Was that when the pumps were built on the Nevada border to get water out of the drainage if needed? The shallowness of the lake makes it different to think about than lake most people are used to. It is more of a big puddle, as a kid being told it was ~30 feet deep at the deepest was hard to believe since I was used to smaller lakes deeper than 100 feet. The idea that the lake could drain seems scary to me since the lake effect helps to increase the amount of snow in the Wasatch. Without the lake, would the Wasatch front look like other basins to the West? It is worth noting that the Salt lake drainage basin is closed but through the Central Utah Project some of the Colorado basin water is claimed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Utah_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Utah_Project This summer I listened to an interview with a guy who paddled around the lake, it was interesting to hear since so much of the lake was more theoretical to me than real. Getting to the edge of the water in many parts wasn't possible or wasn't easy. https://bendingbranches.com/blogs/resources/kayaking-on-great-salt-lake-utah https://bendingbranches.com/blogs/resources/kayaking-on-grea... https://radiowest.kuer.org/agriculture-and-the-environment/2021-10-08/the-state-and-fate-of-the-great-salt-lake-part-ii https://radiowest.kuer.org/agriculture-and-the-environment/2... Sorry, not all this was aimed at you but I figured I'd condense some thoughts into a single reply.
- butlerm 4y ago
  Yes, the pumps were built in the late 1980s and are still maintained, but have never been used for much of anything since then. I believe they ran for about two years. Also, the western edge of the lake (where the pumps are) is still about sixty miles from the Nevada border. Lots of empty salt flats to pump water on top of if that becomes necessary again someday. I believe the general consensus is that the lake effect is marginal at best in terms of total precipitation received in the area.

candrewlee14 4y ago

Ending alfalfa farming would likely help a lot. The water usage is insane for such a small part of Utah’s GDP.

malandrew 4y ago
If it’s so little of GDP, it shouldn’t be hard to make a reasonable off to buy out the water rights.
- elliotec 4y ago
  That’s the hope. The struggle is how stubborn people are.

moloch-hai 4y ago

They just need to float solar farms on it. Those will cut evaporation. Likewise, the Aral Sea. But the main problem is stealing water from rivers feeding it. If they don't get a handle on that, nothing else can help much. There is no substitute for sound governance. Unfortunately, Utah is in the grip of a commitment to bad governance as officially advertised policy. I don't know how you get back from that.

BuffaloBagel 4y ago

Utahn here. We don't have a water problem so much as we have an alfalfa problem. It consumes most of our water with very little economic benefit to the state as a whole.

moloch-hai 4y ago
Likewise, California: alfalfa and almonds, with a side of pomegranates.

goldmint 4y ago

[dead]

fallingfrog 4y ago

Along with Lake Mead, the ogalla aquifer.. That whole area is turning from semi-arid to desert. Time to start moving people away. If I was in charge of those areas, I'd start by buying up and closing farms in order to perform a controlled shutdown of the agricultural sector in those states. The people would leave on their own without the industry there. Without agriculture, the water inputs and outputs would be balanced, at least for the present. There really isn't a choice here between shutting down agriculture in the southwest vs not shutting it down. The only choice is between doing it in a planned, gradual way, or in an unplanned, chaotic way. Do you want this plane to crash, or do you want it to land?

ck2 4y ago

Will it kill less than a million people? Because we've already seen the lack of response when a million die, we start working on the next million.

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CyanLite2 4y ago

Dumb question: could we build a big pipeline from the Pacific Coast and just pump billions (trillions?) of gallons of ocean water to the Great Salt Lake?

masklinn 4y ago
> just pump billions (trillions?) of gallons The deficit is ~1.5 million acre-feet. That's 488 000 000 000 gallons / year. Or 1.3 billion gallons per day. As far as I'm aware, the largest pipeline in the US has around 1/10th that capacity (Colonial has a capacity of 3 million barrels or 126 million gallons a day). Also pumping that much from the pacific would likely annihilate whatever's on the other end of that pipe.
- gremlinsinc 4y ago
  What if we built a huge gulf basically down the plains just on the other side of the rocky's so basically there's a gulf splitting America into two completely by waters from the artic ocean or north pacific, I'm talking we dissect all the way north through canada all the way down through mexico etc. This would maybe create new weather patterns, in combination we'd need to plant LOTS of trees which also creates weather patterns to change, but we could terraform the utah desert to be more like the midwest, but it would be defense-budget costly to do so, but if it worked it could be worth it.

georgewinters 4y ago

FWIW, the snowpack this season is well above average: https://www.ksl.com/weather/snowpack https://www.ksl.com/weather/snowpack

gremlinsinc 4y ago
If you have 5x 8oz cups that are only 25% full, and you add enough water to fill up the 5th cup so that its 100% full, you've still got 24oz of water missing, that needs to catch up. I.e. one good year, won't fix 10 bad ones. Not even close. No offense, but it's worth very little, and is an outlier the future doesn't hold well for this being a 'trend', especially as we enter el nino next year where ocean temps rise, and the west enters a dryer period.

garbagecoder 4y ago

This is what they voted for.

denvaar 4y ago

I live in Salt Lake and most of the time when I mention this issue to friends or family it isn't even on their radar, but this is likely going to cause my wife and I to move somewhere else. It's too bad because this is such a great place to live and its where our family is at. We usually have a really bad inversion in the winter time, and it seems like the summers for the last few years have been filled with wildfire smoke. I'm sick of constantly worrying about the quality of the air I am breathing.

codazoda 4y ago
I'm also from North of SLC. I once read that this area was originally called Smokey Valley by Native American tribes that roamed the area but who usually avoided the valley because of the smoke pollution. It has something to do with how air moves through the area protected by the mountains and the lake. That was before the industrial revolution. I'm sure that the quality of that smoke has degraded with the burning of fossil fuels, but it is interesting that the area has been known as the "smokey valley" for at least a couple hundred years.
- illumin8 4y ago
  Salt Lake County, Weber County, and Utah County all suffer from inversions during cold weather months, which is much of the winter. Inversions are where a layer of warm air traps cold, polluted air inside the valley and air pollution accumulates because it can't go anywhere. I grew up in Utah county and I remember the Geneva steel plant was a huge source of pollution. In my environmental studies class we calculated that on cold weather days when there was an inversion the amount of pollution each person breathed every day was equivalent to smoking 3 cigarettes. Even before internal combustion engines and modern industry the campfires alone must have given Utah valleys the reputation as "smokey valley" by the native Americans. This is not a new phenomenon - the geography of high mountains with lots of population causing pollution in the valleys causes it naturally.
  - butlerm 4y ago
    Geneva Steel in Utah County was constructed for World War II steel production, but fortunately has been closed and its site remediated for a couple of decades now.

NorthOf33rd 4y ago

The reality is that Utah is a theocracy, and BYU (the LDS Church) publishing this is actually a huge step toward positive change. Now the First Presidency can take a stand. If they do take a strong stand I'd expect to see radical changes. If, on the other hand, the LDS Church continues to remain silent, I would expect the environmental catastrophe to continue to lurch forward.

sphars 4y ago
They also made a statement last year[1], about needing to conserve water a lot more and be responsible. They've also taken the steps to reduce water usage at their facilities and allow grounds to become brown and dormant, and use better solutions for future use. A lot of the buildings in my area stopped watering the lawns (I live in Utah). It's not much but a step in the right direction. [1]: https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/drought-water-conservation-statement https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/drought-wat...
butlerm 4y ago
You could hardly make a less informed statement than to compare Utah to a theocracy. The LDS church is influential, but as an organization neither cares about nor has a position about nor preaches to its members about the vast majority of political issues. There are only a handful of well known exceptions - the LDS church leadership does not want to be involved in politics at all and they only do so reluctantly.
- NorthOf33rd 4y ago
  yes that is their official policy but surprise, they don’t do as they preach https://www.kuer.org/politics/2015-04-06/carl-wimmer-opens-up-about-lds-church-utah-legislature-relations?_amp=true https://www.kuer.org/politics/2015-04-06/carl-wimmer-opens-u... https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/08/04/former-utah-senator-criticizes-secretive-puppet-string-lobbying-by-mormon-church/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2017/08/04/former-utah-... Those are two examples behind closed doors. Other legislators don’t want to excommunication, so they’ll never speak up. And then there’s the times the church has made direct public statements or direct cash contributions to political causes like gay marriage in Utah or prop 8 in California. 70% of Utahans listen to a living prophet who shapes their ethics, morality and world view. If you think politics ends at the state house doors or at the ballot box you’re sorely mistaken. In 2016 the first presidency published a letter urging members to vote, and vote with their morals. The church and the living prophet dictate their morals. It’s a pretty straight line. It’s a theocracy, the church always gets what it wants. The U.S. government has turned its cannons against the state house because it recognized that it was a theocracy. The organization and methods have changed significantly since then, but the people in power have not.

grapescheesee 4y ago

Water resources are the ultimate control vector. Its not parties, or states, its power. It is very real how little is being done, and scapegoats are everywhere.

SergeAx 4y ago

Wow, America made it again. I thought I know all the esoteric units, and still here I am. For all poor souls like me: one acre-foot is 1233 cubic meters.

illumin8 4y ago

This was an incredible statistic I noticed in the article: > Air pollution already causes 1-in-5 deaths globally—around 12.1 million premature deaths annually. Is this accurate?