The Great Salt Lake Is Dying

When Brigham Young's advance party arrived in July eighteen forty-seven, the Great Salt Lake covered roughly seventeen hundred square miles of the basin floor, close to the lake's long-term historical average. The lake they saw was one of the largest in North America. Today it covers roughly nine hundred square miles on a good year, and less than that in years of drought. It has lost seventy-three percent of its water and sixty percent of its surface area since European settlement began.

The lake has been declining since at least the nineteen sixties, when agricultural diversions of the rivers that feed it accelerated the shrinkage already underway from a dryer regional climate. The Bear River, the Weber River, and the Jordan River all drain into the Great Salt Lake, and all three have been heavily allocated to agricultural and municipal users for more than a century. The water that reached the lake is now intercepted upstream.

In twenty twenty-two, the lake's surface elevation reached its lowest recorded point in modern history. The result is that approximately eight hundred square miles of former lakebed are now exposed, and that lakebed contains concentrations of arsenic, mercury, selenium, and other heavy metals that accumulated over centuries in the sediment. As the lakebed dries and wind moves across the exposed flats, those heavy metals become dust. Salt Lake City receives roughly fifteen dust storms per year now, compared to nearly none fifteen years ago. Approximately two and a half million people live within range of those storms.

A twenty twenty-two study from Brigham Young University found elevated levels of toxic dust around the lake's perimeter. The Utah Division of Water Resources has been developing an integrated plan for the lake basin. Earthjustice argued a public trust doctrine case in court in September twenty twenty-four on behalf of conservation and community health groups.

Antelope Island, which you can see from the eastern shore, is the largest island in the lake. In the current water levels it is nearly connected to the mainland by exposed lakebed on its northern end. The bison that roam it were brought here in eighteen ninety-three, when the species was nearly extinct. The island is still beautiful. The lake around it is in a condition that has no historical precedent.