RIP in Peace, Great Salt Lake (and by extension, Salt Lake City)...maybe.

[Commissar SFLUFAN]

One of the world’s great lakes is vanishing – and leaving toxic dust in its wake

WWW.INDEPENDENT.CO.UK

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Great Salt Lake, the largest saline lake in the western hemisphere, is at risk of disappearing in just five years. Louise Boyle speaks to one scientist pulling out all the stops to help save it

 

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Some things are so precious, so essential for the common good, they cannot be bought or sold. They fall, instead, to the public trust, a doctrine of common law that dates to the Roman Empire.

 

Great Salt Lake is one. The world’s eighth largest saline lake is the cornerstone of Utah’s outdoorsy lifestyle, supports 7,700 jobs and $1bn in annual economic output. Millions of migratory birds flock to its shores, earning it a reputation as “America’s Serengeti”.

 

And, it is dying.

 

The lake’s water levels hit a record low in November 2022. Despite a record snowfall that winter, its footprint remains one-third what it was a few decades ago. That’s 11ft lower than when the lake was first measured in the mid-1800s.

 

Without dramatic intervention, the lake will disappear in five years, according to 2023 research from Brigham Young University.

 

 

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Threats to Great Salt Lake are colliding on two fronts. More water is being diverted upstream for booming development, which has made Utah the fastest-growing US state, particularly around the Salt Lake City area. Long-foretold consequences of the climate crisis are finally sinking in, drying up rivers and streams, and worsening an already two-decade-long megadrought in the southwest.

 

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The shrinking of the lake is not only expected to harm wildlife populations and the economy. It is, what one Republican lawmaker told The New York Times, a “potential environmental nuclear bomb”.

 

Great Salt Lake is “terminal” as industrial and agricultural by-products, and naturally-occurring elements in surrounding mountains, wash into its basin, and don’t get flushed out.

 

The lakebed contains toxic chemicals – arsenic, lead and mercury – and as water recedes, the wind picks up particles from the dusty flats. Poisonous dust storms could cause severe breathing problems, and increase infant mortality and cancer rates.

 

These threats are far from hypothetical: precedent exists among the Utah lake’s salty cousins.

 

In Iran, Lake Urmia, once the world’s sixth-largest saline lake, has all but dried up. A study last year found that Urmia’s drought significantly contributed to rising cases of hypertension in a county bordering the lake, from 2 per cent in 2012 to 19.5 per cent just seven years later.

 

 

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Utah’s legislature has passed 64 water bills since 2018, some with unanimous, bipartisan support. Last year, lawmakers appointed a Great Salt Lake commissioner to the governor’s cabinet, a role with the express purpose of acting in the lake’s best interests. In January, the first-ever strategic plan to get the lake back to healthy levels was published.

 

What that plan makes clear is there is no silver bullet to save the lake, but that it will take a combination of water conservation, negotiations over water rights, and monitoring water levels to succeed.

 

That won’t happen without farmers, a group well aware of the perils of ignoring nature’s warning signs on such a formidable agricultural landscape.

 

“Farmers are biologists, at the end of the day,” Baxter says. “They understand the trophic nature of the food chains and the ecosystem. Talk about people who’ve had to pay attention to climate.”

 

Millions of dollars are being dedicated to an “Agricultural Water Optimization Programme” to improve efficiency and  “shepherd” conserved water back to the lake.

 

Baxter says she hoped there would be more cooperation with neighbouring states and was urging for Indigenous representation on every committee, to lean on their ancestral knowledge of water systems in the west, “that helps us learn to value water in a different way”. But the most important factor is how quickly fixes can be rolled out.

 

“I just know we don’t have much time,” Baxter says.

 

[osxmatt]

Even the water wants out of Utah

[Mr.Vic20]

Its... Mormon than water now! 

[ThreePi]

Remember when Utah's governor asked people to pray for rain?

 

What happened after a governor asked his state to pray for rain

WWW.DESERET.COM

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Utah Gov. Spencer Cox posted a series of tweets in response to comments about his call to pray for rain, starting by writing that Utah — along with most of the West — “is experiencing its worst drought since 1956.”

 

[GeneticBlueprint]

 

We discussed my impending demise and the obvious, best, cheapest solution here.

 

#laythepipe

[GeneticBlueprint]

Just now, ThreePi said:

Remember when Utah's governor asked people to pray for rain?

 

What happened after a governor asked his state to pray for rain

WWW.DESERET.COM

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Utah Gov. Spencer Cox posted a series of tweets in response to comments about his call to pray for rain, starting by writing that Utah — along with most of the West — “is experiencing its worst drought since 1956.”

 

 

Well, two years later we got more snow than we had in like forty years or something. And the GSL went above its 2022 low. Checkmate atheists.

[GeneticBlueprint]

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“Farmers are biologists, at the end of the day,” Baxter says. “They understand the trophic nature of the food chains and the ecosystem. Talk about people who’ve had to pay attention to climate.”

 

Quoting a portion of your quote @Commissar SFLUFAN

For the most part, this is not correct. Farmers here do NOT understand (or at a minimum do not care about) this. They use every last drop of water they are legally allowed to so that they don't get their allotment cut for the next season. Some laws are trying to change this. But they gotta feed the thirsty alfalfa plant and ship it off to Chinese cows. Our governor was an alfalfa farmer. He is very legitimately concerned about water usage.

[TUFKAK]

Flyover state/10

[Keyser_Soze]

9 minutes ago, TUFKAK said:

Flyover state/10

 

Didn't you just go there or planed to go there? Why did you steal the water?!?!

[TUFKAK]

1 hour ago, Keyser_Soze said:

 

Didn't you just go there or planed to go there? Why did you steal the water?!?!

I was gonna hire a security detail to get my sister out of Israel, I can fly to Utah for her.

[TwinIon]

I always find it funny how many crazy solutions people come up with when it's clear where the outlier is. It's like when congress is looking to reduce the federal budget and they ignore defense spending.

 

The strategic plan they put out starts out with a number: they need an additional ~471-1000 KAF per year to meet the absolute minimum of being minimally healthy in 30 years. That is the absolute lowest target they can come up with. Figure 5 on page 10 showing water usage. Of the average 2300 KAF depleted each year between 1988 and 2022, if you got rid of all municipal, industrial, mining, evaporation, and water used for wetlands, you'd only get about 850 KAF. The rest goes to agriculture. Want more water to fill the lake? 70% already goes into agriculture.

 

I get that no one wants to pick on farmers. It's an essential job in the most critical possible sense. However, it probably doesn't always need to be done in places that don't have water. We have the same problem southern CA. The value of agriculture in Utah is only something like $2B. That strategic plan they put out mentions that the costs of a drying lake are $1.70-$2.2B a year.

 

I'm sorry for the farmers, but it really seems like maybe that's where the majority of the burden needs to fall.

[Spawn_of_Apathy]

No more salt lake city salt water taffy? 

[GeneticBlueprint]

37 minutes ago, TwinIon said:

I get that no one wants to pick on farmers. It's an essential job in the most critical possible sense. However, it probably doesn't always need to be done in places that don't have water. We have the same problem southern CA. The value of agriculture in Utah is only something like $2B. That strategic plan they put out mentions that the costs of a drying lake are $1.70-$2.2B a year.

 

A huge chunk of agricultural farmers here in Utah export their harvests. Not just out of the state. But out of the country and across the Pacific. So I absolutely want to pick on the farmers. Or buy them out. Or cover the costs of them relocating plus a little bonus for their troubles. Or whatever it takes to get them to stop farming here. We live in a desert. We import pretty much all of our food anyways. Chinese cows will just need to get their feed from somewhere else.

 

It feels weird complaining about a high-efficiency, desert resilient plant like alfalfa. But .2% of the state's GDP cannot be taking up to three quarters of our water every year when we're in a decades long drought.

 

The Great Salt Lake is economically important, and we'd be having a different conversation if it drying up was just ending up an economic wash (which it would be). But the environmental effects will be disastrous even to these farmers and we can't do the typical conservative "it's not a problem unless it happens to me" waiting game with stuff like this.

[RobitFarmer]

On 2/28/2024 at 4:02 PM, GeneticBlueprint said:

 

A huge chunk of agricultural farmers here in Utah export their harvests. Not just out of the state. But out of the country and across the Pacific. So I absolutely want to pick on the farmers. Or buy them out. Or cover the costs of them relocating plus a little bonus for their troubles. Or whatever it takes to get them to stop farming here. We live in a desert. We import pretty much all of our food anyways. Chinese cows will just need to get their feed from somewhere else.

 

It feels weird complaining about a high-efficiency, desert resilient plant like alfalfa. But .2% of the state's GDP cannot be taking up to three quarters of our water every year when we're in a decades long drought.

 

The Great Salt Lake is economically important, and we'd be having a different conversation if it drying up was just ending up an economic wash (which it would be). But the environmental effects will be disastrous even to these farmers and we can't do the typical conservative "it's not a problem unless it happens to me" waiting game with stuff like this.

Has the water savings been calculated of driving the Mormons out into the Pacific Ocean? I know it might be genocide, but on the other hand maybe Mormon Jesus will allow them to spout gills and live underwater. Either way it will solve a lot of problems. 

[Littleronin]

On 2/28/2024 at 10:59 AM, GeneticBlueprint said:

 

Quoting a portion of your quote @Commissar SFLUFAN

For the most part, this is not correct. Farmers here do NOT understand (or at a minimum do not care about) this. They use every last drop of water they are legally allowed to so that they don't get their allotment cut for the next season. Some laws are trying to change this. But they gotta feed the thirsty alfalfa plant and ship it off to Chinese cows. Our governor was an alfalfa farmer. He is very legitimately concerned about water usage.

This is exactly what happens here to Walker Lake. Farmers in Yerington would rather flood their farms and cause millions in property damage than allow water to flow to the lake from Walker River. There is a group that buys water rights in small incremates to keep a bit flowing, but it isn't enough. Meanwhile, there are a few court cases that have been ongoing for over a decade now to try and get more water to the lake. 

Here is the timelapse of the lake over the last 40ish years.