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- [00:00]
Tide Representative
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- [00:58]
Will Kaback
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- [01:32]
Isaac Saul
From executive producer Isaac Saul.
- [01:35]
Tide Representative
This is Tangle.
- [01:46]
Will Kaback
Hi everybody and welcome to Tangle's Friday Edition. My name is Will K. Beck. I'm one of Tangle's senior editors, and today I'm going to be reading my piece about Utah's Great Salt Lake. This is the second installment in a series that we're kind of loosely calling what Happened to Blank? And the idea is that we look back at stories from a few years ago that dominated the news cycle, in many cases promising some kind of dire or negative consequence that was imminent and then kind of faded out of the news cycle without a clear resolution or really an idea of what actually happened. So in that spirit, we're going to look at Utah's Great Salt Lake. And I don't want to spoil anything about this story up front, so let's just jump right in. As always, we would love to hear your feedback on this piece, your response, your criticisms, and what other stories in this series you'd like to have us cover. So feel free to write in, let us know and we're excited to hear what you think. Five years in the early days of 2023 a group of researchers and activists published a report with a shocking conclusion. Utah's Great Salt Lake was losing water so fast that it was on track to effectively disappear within five years. The paper instantly made national news with headlines warning of catastrophic consequences if this came to pass. Here's a smattering of the headlines that I found from this time period, a CNN article read. Great Salt Lake will disappear in five years without massive emergency rescue, scientists say Smithsonian Mag wrote. Drying Great Salt Lake could expose millions to toxic arsenic laced dust, the Guardian wrote. Last nail in the Coffin Utah's Great Salt Lake on the verge of Collapse, a follow up piece from the Guardian read. Great Salt Lake's retreat poses a major fear, poisonous dust clouds. NPR said. Climate change and a population boom could dry up the Great Salt Lake in 5 years. WBUR wrote. Collapse of Utah's Great Salt Lake is so close, you can feel it. And an article in the New York Times opinion section was headlined, I'm haunted by what I've seen at Great Salt Lake. Now. The task facing lawmakers, scientists and the public was daunting. No place in the world has ever reversed a saline lake in decline, and many of these lakes are starting to disappear. But a failure to act, as the report and the ensuing news articles warned, would mean near certain devastation to the local environment, economy and residents. Quality of life the lake provides an estimated 7,000 jobs in Utah and supports several key industries such as salt production, lithium batteries, brine shrimp, and even alpine skiing from the lake effect snow. All in all, it contributes about $1.9 billion to Utah's economy annually. But it's similarly critical to the ecosystem of the region and really the whole world. Approximately 10 million birds from 338 different species across the planet visit the lake during their migrations, and it also supports 80% of Utah's valuable wetlands. Unsurprisingly, then, the report prompted immediate bipartisan action. At the start of the Utah Legislature's annual session in January 2023, lawmakers proposed 14 bills supporting water conservation and investing in revitalizing the lake. They passed nine of those bills and also created the Office of the Great Salt Lake Commissioner, tasked with developing a strategic plan for the lake's health. In short order, a litany of public and private interests snapped to attention and got to work, seemingly catalyzed by the report's warning that the lake could be gone by the end of the decade. Now, today, over two and a half years since scientists issued that five year warning, state leaders have begun questioning the credibility of the report and the initial momentum has flagged, most notably in March of 2024. Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, called the prediction, quote, laughable, telling npr, quote, it's a joke and everybody knows it's a joke. They were never serious about that. That's the doomerism that is terrible for people, end quote. In the two years after the report was issued, the Great Salt Lake's water loss not only slowed, but the water level actually increased in 2024. The lake's two sides, which are divided into north and south arms by an embankment, were three feet higher than two years prior. So what happened here? At first blush, the story appears to be an example of science gone wrong, an exaggerated claim of imminent danger founded on flawed assumptions and questionable processes that damage the public's trust in the scientific community and its receptiveness to future warnings. But could it actually be a story of the power of concerted action or poor science communication in the media? Well, drawing on interviews with the lead authors of that 2023 five year report, Utah's Great Salt Lake Commissioner, a former member of Utah's Air Quality Board and an expert on the lake's atmospheric effects, we'll explore the uncertain future of the Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and a vessel for the health and aspirations of millions of people.
- [07:26]
John Law
We'll be right back after this quick break.
- [07:32]
Tide Representative
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- [08:39]
Will Kaback
To understand the lake's predicament, it's important to know what makes it unique. The lake is salty, up to nine times more briny than the ocean in certain locations because, unlike other lakes, it is terminal, meaning it has no outflow points. In other words, Once water reaches the lake, it stays there. Great Salt Lake receives the bulk of its water from rivers and streams, with a smaller percentage coming from direct precipitation and groundwater. The Great Salt Lake is also a remnant of Lake Bonneville, an even more massive pluvial lake, which is a body of water formed by a combination of excessive rainfall and low evaporation levels, and that covered a larger area from about 30,000 to 13,000 years ago. As the Great Salt Lake's water naturally evaporates, it leaves behind minerals and salt from this past period. Today, the Great Salt Lake is a totem for the state and a fascinating product of the natural world intersecting with human development. You can see those dynamics just by looking at it from above. And here we'll put a link to some images of the Great Salt Lake that we have in the newsletter, so you can check those out in the episode notes. But what these images are showing is that the lake is separated into those north and south arms, having been bifurcated by the Union Pacific railroad causeway in 1959. The division has produced distinct ecological features in each arm. The north is cut off from most freshwater inflows and thus is much saltier than its counterpart, creating a striking visual difference. Now, scientists have used the North Arm to offset rising salinity in the South Arm as its water elevation drops. The Great Salt Lake is relatively shallow, as is, with a maximum depth of about 35ft. And the South Arm's water level in particular varies widely from year to year, depending on factors like snowfall, no river's flow into the North Arm, making its water level more consistent, but also its water much saltier. And in fact, by cordoning off the higher salinity into the north side, scientists say that the embankment dividing the lake has actually been key to keeping the South Arm's salinity level tolerable to the ecosystem. Even as its water level drops. The North Arm is somewhat of a cautionary example of what the South Arm could become if salinity continues to rise. Bonnie Baxter, a professor of biology at Westminster University, was a co Author of the 2023 report on the lake's potential ecological collapse, and she told me that the South Arm is nearing its breaking point. Quote, the brine shrimp and brine flies won't be able to live there, and they feed the 10 million birds that visit the lake every year. She said, we know what it will look like if the lake gets too salty, and that's not when the lake is on its last drop of water. Ecological collapse will come well before that. In Baxter and her co authors report. They highlighted how the Great Salt Lake's water level has declined precipitously this century. The evidence of this is clear to the naked eye, and here's where you should go to the show notes and check out two different visuals of satellite imagery of the lake in 2000 and the same satellite image of the lake in 2020. Effectively, what it shows is that the lake has shrunk considerably. Now water use is the primary driver of the lake's decline. Utah diverts roughly 2.1 million acre feet over 600 billion gallons of water from entering the Great Salt Lake each year. Much of that water goes to agriculture, which accounts for about 67% of withdrawals that would otherwise go to the lake. With alfalfa and hay as the most water intensive crops, Utah's population has also strained water resources. The state is projected to add 500,000 residents in the next decade, about a 14% increase from its current population. And Salt Lake county alone is expected to add 125,000 new residents. Of course, more people means more water use. Baxter and Ben Abbott, an associate professor of plant and wildlife sciences at Brigham Young University and another co author of the paper, have been studying the Great Salt Lake for years, and their research has been key to tracking the lake's decline and informing policymakers. As the lake neared record lows in 2022, however, their sense of urgency ratcheted up. Quote the lake was potentially within a matter of months of ecological collapse, Abbott told me, noting that the brine shrimp and flies, which are key players in the lake's ecosystem, experienced huge population loss due to the lake's rising salinity. These observations led him to conclude the lake was nearing a point of no return far faster than the public or lawmakers realized. Quote we had to communicate the urgency of the issue, abbott said. My colleagues and I did discuss being more vague and saying the lake could disappear in the next few decades or the lake is near the edge. But the specificity was really important. I would not feel ethical as a researcher if we hadn't been as clear as we were. The report also touched on the impact of climate change on the lake's health. It calls climate change a, quote, secondary contributor, estimating that human greenhouse gas emissions have caused about 4 degrees Fahrenheit of warming in northern Utah since 1900 and exacerbated drought in the southwestern U.S. this, the authors argue, has led to reduced runoff to the Great Salt Lake and increased evaporation. In all, they find, climate change accounts for roughly 9% of the lake's decline. Other researchers have reported further distressing findings. Soren Brothers, a former assistant professor of limnology, the Study of Inland Aquatic Ecosystems at Utah State University and the current curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, led research into the drying lake bed, and his study found that as the Great Salt Lake dried, it exposed sediment that was emitting carbon dioxide and methane. In 2020, the lake emitted 4.1 million tons of CO2, or equivalent greenhouse gases, about 7% of Utah's carbon dioxide emission. That percentage will likely rise as more lakebed becomes exposed, he told me. That exposed lakebed also runs the risk of releasing toxic dust into the atmosphere, the poisonous dust clouds that the news articles I read at the beginning of this piece warned of. In early 2023, Carrie Kelly, an associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Utah and a former member of Utah's Air Quality Board, told me about her research into the effects of the dust that comes off the lake, which has been linked to asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, copd, heart attacks, heart failure and arrhythmia. She found that particle samples from the lake showed higher oxidative potential, a measure of how much inflammation those particles might generate than samples compared to other regional playas. Quote we saw elevated levels of copper and manganese and iron. Those are transition metals and they tend to be pretty reactive. When they get into your lungs they can cause a lot of irritation and damage, she said. Around the lake we have smelting operations and other industrial activity. We're a big urban area and what ends up in the road eventually ends up in the lake. Now that the lake bed is exposed, we're breathing it in. Abbott told me that all of these factors water use, climate change and increasing emissions clearly showed the lake was in grave danger. While the five year projection prompted scrutiny after the fact, he said their conclusion was never in doubt and he wouldn't change it. The pre existing narrative in the public was yes, the Great Salt Lake is reaching an all time low, but we've got a lot of time. Eventually we'll need to fix this, but not this year, abbott told me. In the scientific and lake management communities there was total consensus. Though we were not close to the edge, we were barreling over the ed.
- [16:23]
John Law
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- [16:59]
Isaac Saul
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- [17:59]
Tide Representative
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- [18:31]
Will Kaback
What happened? The report prompted alarm, then action, then doubt, then ambivalence. Of course, it's too early to render judgment on the paper's projection, as we're only halfway through its five year timeline. However, we can take stock of how a series of events, both natural and human driven, have impacted the lake's outlook since the start of 2023. Most notably, the report was published in the midst of record snowfall in the state on January 11, 2023. The state's median snowpack was at 191% of its normal level and and it had already matched the levels of the historic 20102011 water year. The snow was sorely needed in a state where 95% of the water supply comes from snowpack collection and the spring snowmelt runoff period. It also meant more water flowing into the Great Salt Lake. Now, every expert I spoke to for this piece described this 2023 snowfall as vital. Brothers said the snowfall in 2023 was was a very helpful stabilizing force for the lake. Kelly said.
- [19:43]
John Law
Hey everybody, this is John, Executive Producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest Friday edition. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to readtangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription. Or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. I will join you for the daily podcast on Monday. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y'.
- [20:34]
Will Kaback
All.
- [20:37]
John Law
Peace.
- [20:40]
Our Executive Editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our Executive Producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior Editor Will Kaback and Associate Editors Audrey Moorhead, Bailey Saul, Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75 and John Law. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@readtangle.com.