What Measures Can Be Taken to Prevent the Shrinking of The Great Salt Lake?
In the autumn of 2022, three duck hunters dragged a sled across cracked desert sand in search of water's edge at Antelope Island State Park near Salt Lake City. The birds they sought huddled in meager puddles far in the distance, while to the west, the docks of an abandoned marina caved into the dust, and a lonely sailboat sat beached amid sagebrush.
Chad Yamane, the regional director of Ducks Unlimited, a nonprofit that conserves, restores and manages habitats for North America's waterfowl and a waterfowl hunter himself, expressed concern that biologists are worried that they're on the brink of ecological collapse of the lake. Last fall, the Great Salt Lake hit its lowest level since record keeping began. The lake's elevation sank to nearly six meters below the long-term average, shriveling the Western Hemisphere's largest saline lake to half its historic surface area. The lake's shrinking threatens to upend the ecosystem, disrupting the migration and survival of ducks, geese and other birds numbering 10 million.
It's not just duck hunters who are worried about the Great Salt Lake; the decades-long decline in the lake level is also raising alarm bells for millions of people who reside in the area. As the lake recedes, Salt Lake City and the surrounding communities face a host of potential problems. The low lake level and increasing salinity threaten to disrupt economic mainstays such as agriculture, tourism, mineral extraction and brine shrimp harvesting. Exposed sediments can also reduce air quality, thus threatening public health. Chad Yamane points out that "it concerns everyone. It's now on the forefront of every Utahan's mind."
Many of the world's saline lakes are facing a double whammy: people are taking more water from the tributaries that feed the lakes, while a hotter, drier climate means it takes longer to refill them. Saline lakes are terminal lakes found on every continent, including the Caspian Sea, the largest lake in the world and the Dead Sea, the lowest. As water evaporates, it leaves behind salts from minerals that have washed off the surrounding landscape. Since they are usually found in arid landscapes that receive little precipitation, saline lakes are the first in line to be affected by long-term droughts, becoming more frequent due to climate change.
People living in these deserts divert freshwater for crops, homes, and industry as the lakes shrink, leading to higher salt concentrations. Lake Poopó, a high-elevation lake in Bolivia, which once stretched 90 kilometers long and 32 kilometers wide, is now a salty mud flat. The Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, previously the world's fourth-largest lake, has withered to a tenth of its historic surface area at times in recent decades. Similarly, India's largest inland salt lake, Sambhar Salt Lake, is in severe decline, whereas Africa's Lake Chad shares the same fate. Nevada's Winnemucca Lake dried up, so long ago that most people have forgotten it was ever wet; the waters that fed it were diverted to agricultural fields.
Brigham Young University researchers released a report in January indicating that the Great Salt Lake will likely disappear within five years if the current rate of "unsustainable" water consumption continues. The good news is that Utahans still have time to halt or even reverse the Great Salt Lake's decline by using less water. By cutting agricultural and outdoor water use by a third to half through a combination of voluntary conservation measures and policy changes, the lake can refill sufficiently to support the area's economy, ecology, and quality of life, says the report. If Utahans succeed, the Great Salt Lake can serve as a model for saving other saline lakes throughout the world.
Like other terminal lakes, the Great Salt Lake naturally rises or falls based on how much water falls into and evaporates from its watershed each year. Most precipitation falls as snow in the winter and melts each spring to fill streams, which empty into the lake. Due to its surprising shallowness, with an average depth of slightly over four meters, the Great Salt Lake fills or drains quickly. For instance, a wet spell in the 1980s swelled the lake's surface area to nearly 6,000 square kilometers, over twice as large as it is today.
Although there are natural variations, the level of the Great Salt Lake is undoubtedly declining. Experts Wayne Wurtsbaugh and Sarah Null, based at Utah State University, have modeled the hydrology of the lake and found that if settlers hadn't started diverting water from rivers and streams in the region in the mid-19th century, the lake would be 3.4 meters higher than its current level.
Today, agriculture accounts for three-quarters of the water consumed in the Great Salt Lake watershed, mainly used to grow hay for cattle that produce beef or dairy. Mineral extraction, which involves diverting briny water directly from the lake, accounts for 9 percent of water consumption, while 9 percent is piped to cities for indoor, outdoor, and industrial use. The remaining 8 percent is lost to evaporation from lakes and reservoirs in the region.
Record low levels of the Great Salt Lake have also been attributed to climate change, exacerbated by the worst megadrought the American Southwest has seen in 1,200 years. The lake is struggling to refill quickly enough to keep up with withdrawals upstream, and higher temperatures are driving increased evaporation.
Research by Patrick Donnelly of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that people require more water for agriculture and lawns during hot, dry periods, which he describes as a "climate tax" on waterways. Donnelly also measured changes in 18 saline lakes in the Intermountain West, finding that, on average, surface areas had decreased by 27 percent between 1984 and 2018. Wetlands in the area had lost almost half their surface area, losses driven by the demands of irrigated agriculture and higher temperatures that increase evaporation rates.
As Utah is the fastest-growing state in the U.S. and 80 percent of its residents live in the Great Salt Lake watershed, it's unlikely that existing water supplies will be sufficient to meet demand. There are plans to dam and divert the Bear River to supply growing communities in Utah, but this would lower the Great Salt Lake's level and increase salinity to over 22 percent, causing damage to its invertebrate community.
The consequences of a shrunken Great Salt Lake are already being felt by mineral extraction industries, ranchers, and even ski resorts that benefit from winter snowfall triggered by the lake's warm waters. Should the lake completely dry up, winds could cause dust storms that contribute to air pollution and health problems similar to those experienced in Central California's Owens Lake, once a fertile farmland surface before it was drained for human water consumption. Owens Lake is now a source of dust pollution, and the City of Los Angeles has spent billions of dollars mitigating dust through a mixture of projects, from flooding to planting vegetation.
Salt Lake City has been hit with sobering news as last fall it had exposed seven times more lake bed than Owens Lake. Strong south winds cause dust clouds to form over the exposed lake bed, carrying pollutants and heavy metals that increase rates of disease associated with air pollution. The Great Salt Lake supports almost 350 different bird species that use the freshwater lake to rest and refuel. However, more than half of the saline lakes in the West that are most important for birds have shrunk by 50 to 95 percent in their surface area over the last 150 years.
Drying is a concern for the Great Salt Lake’s eared grebes and phalaropes. During some fall migrations, 5 million eared grebes - potentially 95% of the species’ entire population - stop over in Utah, with each grebe requiring up to 30,000 brine shrimp per day from the Great Salt Lake. Brine shrimp start to decline drastically above 12-17% salinity, however, the south arm of the Great Salt Lake reached 18% last September. To halt the Great Salt Lake’s decline, residents can use less water. Utahans have the second highest per capita use of water in the US, and water conservation is crucial for saving the lake.
Permanently mandating water cutbacks would cost between $5 to $32 per person, according to research by Wurtsbaugh and Null. The BYU team’s report, coauthored by 32 Great Salt Lake experts, emphasises conservation as the “only way to provide adequate water in time to save Great Salt Lake”. Specifically, the report stresses the importance of reducing outdoor water use, especially on agricultural fields. Legislation around water conservation has already been passed, such as banning requirements for residents to water their lawns and the installation of meters to track outdoor water use.
Since agriculture accounts for three-quarters of the water use in the Great Salt Lake region, Utah is also encouraging farmers and ranchers to conserve water. This shift has the advantage of making operations more drought resilient, says Ferry, who is also a fifth-generation rancher who irrigates with water from the Bear River. “Producers want to be part of the solution. They have to be.”
In 2022, the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food’s Water Optimization Program granted $70 million to help farmers and ranchers install drip or sprinkler systems that use less water. The Utah State Legislature also appropriated $40 million last year to preserve flows to the lake. Much of that is dedicated to setting up a water trust to lease water rights from farmers or ranchers willing to sell. Essentially, a water trust would pay irrigators to leave some or all of the water they are permitted to use in the stream or river instead of diverting it to water crops. These water leases could last a single summer or several years.
Water leasing is helping restore other ailing saline lakes. In Nevada, purchasing water rights from willing sellers has boosted the level of Walker Lake, about 150 kilometers southeast of Reno. But because water is so valuable in the arid West, it’s an expensive way to refill a lake. The Walker Basin Restoration Program has spent at least $92 million but has only acquired 53 percent of the water needed to support native fish and wildlife in the lake.
If water conservation programs don’t work, Utahans might be faced with a more extreme solution to save the Great Salt Lake.
The alternative to conservation measures, says Null, is “hanging our hopes on big new infrastructure projects” that attempt to refill the lake by bringing water from other basins. One example is the Central Utah Project, which has been in the works for more than 80 years and is still incomplete. This project pipes up to 310 billion liters of water from the Colorado River Basin in eastern Utah, infamously over-tapped already, into a series of reservoirs and tunnels to supply water for irrigation, municipal and industrial uses in the Great Salt Lake’s watershed. According to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, the initial plans for the Central Utah Project put it “among the most complex” water resources development projects ever undertaken by the bureau, estimated to cost $3 billion once all phases are complete.
In the Aral Sea, dikes were built to preserve the remaining sliver of wet habitat, which meant permanently sacrificing the rest of the historical lake area. In California, Mono Lake was saved by a lawsuit based on the public trust doctrine, which says that the government has a responsibility to protect the resources that belong to everyone. The court’s decision cut off water to cities in Southern California that held water rights to the river that fed Mono Lake. Los Angeles made up the difference in part through water conservation measures.
Ferry says Utah isn’t closing the door on any options. Some of the more unorthodox ideas floating around Salt Lake City include cloud seeding to boost precipitation and piping water from the Pacific Ocean to refill the lake. But the most common strategy echoed by the Utahans interviewed for this story: Pray for snow.
“I’m very optimistic that we are at the lowest of lows,” Ferry said last fall, “as long as we get some snow.”
Utah received a record-setting amount of snow this winter, so the situation is looking up … at least for now. But it will take several years of above-average precipitation to reverse Utah’s lingering drought.
“Mother Nature has a huge role to play in this,” Yamane says. “And it’s going to take a mind-set change, a cultural change and policy changes. But along with Mother Nature, we should be able to save it.”
