Great Salt Lake is in crisis, drying so fast it may cease to function as a living body of water in just a few years, parched by the huge volumes of rain and snowmelt diverted to irrigate crops and flush toilets.
On a recent morning, dead birds lay decomposing alongside the water in northwestern Utah, whose recession has exposed long stretches of sandy shoreline and lumps of land that resemble floating ice floes.
“This is really an existential threat to our way of life in this region,” said Ben Abbott, an aquatic ecologist at Brigham Young University who is among the leading scientific advocates for the lake and a co-author of a recent report that warned if current rates of depletion continue, “the lake as we know it is on track to disappear in five years.”
Allowing it to dry up “would certainly be one of the largest ecological disasters in modern U.S. history,” he said, worse even than calamities like the partial nuclear meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979.
“The only thing that’s going to change the situation, that’s increasing water flow to the lake,” he said.
Aquatic ecologist Ben Abbott calls the drying an 'existential threat' to local ways of life.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
Just how to do that has now become a central preoccupation for Utah and turned the state into one of the most acute testbeds for water issues in the United States.
On the Colorado River, declining water levels have brought the reservoirs behind the Hoover and Glen Canyon dams to levels low enough that the federal government has mandated emergency cutbacks in water use. In California, officials have called for the removal of 46 square kilometres of lawns and construction of new ways to capture runoff water – including the reintroduction of beavers, although many of those actions remain nascent.
But in Utah, the drying of Great Salt Lake now appears so imminent that it is prompting action. The recession of its waters places into jeopardy the bounty of snow that has made the state a global skiing destination and risks arsenic in the lakebed that can be stirred up into toxic dust storms, a situation Joel Ferry, executive director of the state’s Department of Natural Resources, likens to “a potential environmental nuclear bomb, if we don’t take action.”
At full capacity, Great Salt Lake is nearly half the size of Lake Ontario, although it has already contracted considerably. Further drying could produce dust storms able to reach nearly 1,000 kilometres, enough to touch Canada to the north and Mexico to the south.
The lake is of “hemispherical importance,” Mr. Ferry said. “And it really is a treasure that we have and it’s worth fighting for.”
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UTAH
Great Salt Lake
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UNITED STATES
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Provo
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREET-
MAP CONTRIBUTORS
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Great Salt Lake
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UNITED STATES
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Provo
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREET-
MAP CONTRIBUTORS
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UTAH
Great Salt Lake
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UNITED STATES
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Provo
THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: TILEZEN; OPENSTREETMAP CONTRIBUTORS
The crisis at the lake has produced no shortage of ideas to fix the problem. One state lawmaker wants to use nuclear energy to pump deep groundwater to the lake. Others have recommended a mass forest cull, saying the state has too many trees that are sucking up too much water.
A private company wants to build a huge network of islands in nearby Utah Lake, which it says would reduce evaporation and could allow more water to flow into Great Salt Lake. Legislators have looked to cloud seeding to wring more water from the skies and mused about the possibility of piping in water from elsewhere. One engineer even wrote Prof. Abbott to suggest delivering Pacific Ocean water by train – although the lake needs such great volumes that the cost would approach US$200-billion a year.
How Utah acts is especially important, Prof. Abbott said, because it is dependably conservative. That makes it what he calls a “head-turner state,” whose actions are viewed with less skepticism than those of liberal regions such as Colorado or California.
If Utah can find a way to resolve the Great Salt Lake crisis, the steps it takes could build a template for others to follow.
Some of those steps have already been notable. Last year, the state upended established legal principle and allowed water users to designate – and potentially sell – volumes to the lake. That step also opens the way to create a market for water rights, which economists say is key to creating incentives for conservation.
“We’ve had shifts in thinking and shifts in policy that recognize that Great Salt Lake should be entitled to water,” both for economic reasons but also for “intrinsic ecological purposes,” said Laura Briefer, the director of public utilities in Salt Lake City. “Because we recognize that if our ecosystem collapses, that is a tremendous risk to the resiliency of our community as well.”
Dead birds lie on the lakeshore.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
So far, however, none of that has been enough to produce more than marginal new water flows to the lake, prompting a search for new ideas.
In January, Salt Lake City proposed a plan to cordon off some of its own water supplies to ensure they flow to the lake, barring them from allocation to new users. If “you have a government like the state of Utah that is very supportive of business growth, the surety of that water making it to the Great Salt Lake is not stable,” said Mayor Erin Mendenhall.
Dedicating the water to the lake would constrain future economic growth. But “if we lose the lake, there is no economy,” she said in an interview.
At the state level, officials have begun an accounting exercise to find the water volumes they say are needed to stabilize the lake. The “shortfall is about 450,000 acre-feet per year,” or 555 billion litres, said Mr. Ferry. Secure that amount of water, and wet years – such as the current winter – can, over time, begin to refill the lake, he said.
To get there, it’s a question of adding up numbers. Installing modern toilets, faucets and shower heads could save 15,000 acre-feet. Adding water meters could prompt conservation of 54,000 acre-feet, in part by reducing overwatering of lawns. Better agriculture practices, including more efficient irrigation and water transportation – by, for example, lining ditches – should save hundreds of thousands more. In dry years, the state can, as an emergency response, pay crop-growers to produce less alfalfa, thereby using less water.
Do all of that, he said, and Utah can save the lake without forcing farmers to fallow land. “Let’s grow what we’re growing using less water,” he said.
Great Salt Lake water volume
Millions of acre feet (MAF)
30
20
73%
decline
6.9
MAF
10
0
1990
2000
2010
2020
Water consumption by type, 2020
Per cent
Mineral
extraction 9%
Agriculture: 74%
Cities/
industry: 9%
Reservoir: 8%
the globe and mail, Source: GLS Briefing, Benjamin W. Abbott et al
Great Salt Lake water volume
Millions of acre feet (MAF)
30
20
73%
decline
6.9
MAF
10
0
1990
2000
2010
2020
Water consumption by type, 2020
Per cent
Mineral
extraction 9%
Agriculture: 74%
Cities/
industry: 9%
Reservoir: 8%
the globe and mail, Source: GLS Briefing, Benjamin W. Abbott et al
Great Salt Lake water volume
Millions of acre feet (MAF)
30
20
73%
decline
6.9
MAF
10
0
1990
2000
2010
2020
Water consumption by type, 2020
Per cent
Mineral
extraction 9%
Agriculture: 74%
Cities/
industry: 9%
Reservoir: 8%
the globe and mail, Source: GLS Briefing, Benjamin W. Abbott et al
But for that proposal to work, the state will have to temporarily sacrifice roughly 40 per cent of the lake. Great Salt Lake is divided by a railway causeway. The northern arm is far saltier, with salinity levels almost as high as the Dead Sea, and some eight times that of ocean water. Rather than preserve the entire lake, Mr. Ferry and others say their intent is to maintain the health, and in particular the salinity levels, in the southern areas.
To do that, the Great Salt Lake Salinity Advisory Committee voted in late January to recommend raising a berm dividing the two halves of the lake, preventing any new water from reaching the north arm. That arm will not be “gone forever,” Mr. Ferry said. “But the south arm is where the critical habitat is.”
Brine shrimp and brine flies in the south arm support industrial harvesting and 10 million birds, including eared grebes, tundra swans, snowy plovers and other species that pass through the area, many on migratory paths to Canada.
Scientists are concerned that if salinity levels rise too high, the brine fly population will collapse. The lake’s brine shrimp, a key food source for global aquaculture, have already shown signs of stress. Those two species are of fundamental importance, since little else grows in the lake.
“Because the food chain is so simple, when there is one part not doing well, nothing can make up for it,” said Carly Biedul, administrator of the Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College.
Brine shrimp and flies in the lake are under increasing stress, says Carly Biedul of the Great Salt Lake Institute.Nathan VanderKlippe/The Globe and Mail
The state believes its plan will keep salinity low enough to preserve the flies and shrimp. Prof. Abbott isn’t convinced. The report he co-authored suggests the amount of additional water needed is up to 1.2 million acre-feet per year, considerably above the state’s target. New volumes, he said, are also needed urgently, and it could take years to improve agricultural practices.
Prof. Abbott’s work has been controversial. The company that proposed island-building in Utah Lake sued him for US$3-million for defamation. A judge threw out the suit in late January.
The legal threats have done little to dim his advocacy. On the January day he met with The Globe and Mail, he travelled to the Church Office Building, the 28-storey Salt Lake City administrative headquarters of the Mormon Church, to meet with some of the church’s most senior leaders.
Mormon settlers helped to build much of the state’s water infrastructure in decades past. Today, the church could be an important agent of change. Its real estate holdings are considerable, and it maintains a unique position of trust among farmers whose actions will be pivotal to the state’s water future. “Clear guidance from the church really could have a large impact,” Prof. Abbott said.
The church declined a request for comment.
For Prof. Abbott, the need to save Great Salt Lake has a spiritual importance of its own. Mormons “recognize a spiritual component to all life and all creation, even inanimate aspects of creation,” he said. “Where we’ve got to get is this recognition that Great Salt Lake has a right to exist.”
Water in America: More from Nathan VanderKlippe
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U.S. drought gives an Arizona dam’s critics a new argument for having it demolished
Lake Mead’s vanishing waters give way to grisly discoveries during a lengthy drought
Beavers are superhero rodents in California’s fight against climate change
Nathan VanderKlippe