Scientists fear a Great Toxic Dustbowl could soon emerge
from the Great Salt Lake
—
Like the rest of the West, Utah has a water problem. But
megadrought and overconsumption aren’t just threats to
wildlife, agriculture and industry here. A disappearing
Great Salt Lake could poison the lungs of more than 2.5
million people.
When lake levels hit historic lows in recent months, 800
square miles of lakebed were exposed – soil that holds
centuries of natural and manmade toxins like mercury,
arsenic and selenium. As that mud turns to dust and
swirls to join some of the worst winter air pollution in
the nation, scientists warn that the massive body of
water could evaporate into a system of lifeless finger
lakes within five years, on its way to becoming the Great
Toxic Dustbowl.
“This is an ecological disaster that will become a human
health disaster,” warned Bonnie Baxter, director of the
Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College in Salt
Lake City, Utah. “We know about dust storms, we know
about particulate pollution, we know about heavy metals
and how they’re bad for humans,” she told CNN. “We see a
crisis that is imminent.”
As a so-called “terminal lake,” Great Salt Lake is fed by
rain, snow and runoff but with no rivers to take water to
the ocean, salt and minerals build up over time. Only
brine flies and shrimp can survive in the salty water,
creating a unique ecosystem that supports 10 million
migratory birds. With only sail boats and paddleboards
navigating the lake, it is so peaceful, 80,000 white
pelicans annually nest on islands without fish.
But as the water evaporates without replenishment, the
yacht basin is all mud, predators can walk to the pelican
nests and the bottom of the food chain is collapsing.
“You’ve got the lake shrinking, the habitat is drying up
and what water is remaining is too salty for (algae and
microbes) to survive,” Baxter said.
She came to Utah to study this biology 15 years ago and
soon realized that the fate of the brine shrimp is
directly related to the future of Salt Lake City. When
she’s not teaching biology, she visits schools,
retirement homes and farm conventions to spread the word
that every drop of water counts – now more than ever.
“It’s not like scientists to be dramatic,” Baxter
laughed, but said there was no hesitation among the
nearly three dozen scientists and conservationists who
released the frightening report aimed directly at Utah
legislators that said the lake was on track to vanish in
five years.
Others have since joined the call for emergency measures.
A new partnership between university researchers and
state officials overseeing natural resources, agriculture
and food have formed a “Great Salt Lake Strike Team,” and
released a report this week urging lawmakers to rewrite
water law.
“We have to get more water to the lake,” said Steed,
executive director of the Janet Quinney Lawson Institute
for Land, Water and Air at Utah State University and a
co-chair of the strike team. “For a long time, I don’t
think that people were sufficiently talking for the lake.
Now, I think that we have a lot of people interested, the
governor of the state and the legislature.”
As a sign of the unifying power of water, he traveled to
the campus of rival University of Utah where the rooftop
lab of John Lin, professor of Atmospheric Sciences,
measures just how closely air and water are related.
“Air quality is bipartisan,” Lin said. “We all want clean
air and to do something about it.”
The more than 2 million people who live in Salt Lake City
and along the Wasatch Front from Ogden to Provo already
suffer some of the worst winter air pollution in the
country, with tiny particulates forming dense brown
clouds. Further drying of the Great Salt Lake could lead
to more pollution, Lin and Steed said.
As a cautionary tale, they point to California’s Owens
Lake, which was notoriously drained by developers in the
1920s to build Los Angeles and inspired the watery, 1974
noir “Chinatown.” By 1926, the terminal lake was dry and
producing billowing clouds of fine, toxic dust which
became known as “Keeler fog” after it forced people in
the town of Keeler to relocate.
A century later, every time an Angeleno pays a water
bill, a portion goes to clean up the mistake with a dust
mitigation program run by the city’s Department of Water
and Power after the city took responsibility. After
decades of moving water and gravel to control the dust,
the bill for draining Owens Lake is $2.5 billion and
rising.
“It was human choices that led to that catastrophic
event,” Steed said of California’s painful lesson. “We’re
looking at the Great Salt Lake in a position right now to
where we can avoid that catastrophe, where we don’t have
to spend those billions of dollars in remediation in the
future if we make choices today.”
“Obviously, there’s fights,” he said, acknowledging the
old “whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting”
cliché. “But what gives me hope is that we’re seeing a
lot more collaboration than I have seen in my lifetime,
especially around something like the Great Salt Lake.
There was a time that people thought that ‘Any water that
makes it there, well, that’s just lost water.’ Now we’re
seeing that the stuff that makes it there is actually
really important to all of us here,” Steed said.
Moonshot proposals to save the lake include a plan to
pipe water from the Pacific – a costly endeavor both in
terms of money and planet-warming pollution.
“The carbon equation is enormous,” Baxter said,
describing the amount of energy it would take to pump
billions of gallons 750 miles. “The expense is enormous.
And you would be bringing salt water here, which is
actually not what we need. We don’t need more salt. We
need less salt.”
“I think that the cheapest solution is for the state to
buy some of the farmers out of their water rights and
release some of this water in the natural system,” she
said. “I know the farmers that I’ve talked to, they want
to be part of the solution. They live here too.”
And while she waits for minds to change, Baxter can only
hope for snow after recent storms raised the lake level
by around a foot.
“But last year we went up a foot and down two and a half
feet,” she shrugged. “The aquifers are dry so we’ve got
to fill all of that first. So, the direct precipitation
into the lake gave us a foot and that’s great. But the
runoff in the spring might not bring as much water as we
hope.”
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