Utah’s Choice: Use Cleantech To Conserve Water Or Face Toxic Dust Clouds (Part 2)

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Because the process of drying up Lake Cabeza de Vaca and its remnant child lakes happened mostly naturally (with only the last bit caused by Anthropogenic climate change), this presents the absolute best case scenario for a dried up Salt Lake, but as I’ll get to later, the problem will be far worse for Utahns and people in neighboring states. But, we do need a mostly natural baseline to compare to, so I raised it first.

To fully learn about what happens when big lakes dry up, we have to look at other examples as well. Want another example that’s more recent? Look at the dried up Aral Sea, widely considered to be “one of the planet’s worst environmental disasters.” Too foreign for you? Let’s look at Owens Lake in California. These examples are very relevant, but before we compare them and learn from them, let’s compare the Great Salt Lake’s natural history with that of Lake Cabeza de Vaca to broaden our understanding of the drying up process.

Utah Is On This Same Natural Path, But Not As Far Along

People familiar with the Great Salt Lake probably saw some similarities in the story of Lake Cabeza de Vaca and the lakes near El Paso. After all, today’s Great Salt Lake is but a remnant of a much larger lake that once filled most of western Utah, along with portions of Nevada and Idaho. Known as Lake Bonneville, this lake was at its maximum size only 17,000 years ago, so the signs of its former size are a lot easier to see than the vaguely reddish flat areas near El Paso (and this is an important distinction I’ll get into in a few).

Google’s aerial imagery shows us massive salt flats near the present-day Great Salt Lake where the much larger Lake Bonneville was.

Like Lake Cabeza de Vaca, the massive weight of Lake Bonneville eventually found a weak spot and broke through. Red Rock Pass, in southern Idaho, still shows signs of the massive dump of water that came through the area, with the water rushing to the Pacific Ocean. Today’s Snake River and Columbia River paths were carved by the sudden draining of the lake.

This alone didn’t take the lake to modern levels. There was a massive drop, but the lake was still far larger than today’s like until the last glacial period (or “ice age”) ended. As the region became warmer and drier, evaporation exceeded the inflows of water from rivers, and the lake drained until it became what Mormon settlers moved in next to in 1847.

You can see a really good animation of the lake’s history here at Aero-Graphics’ Vimeo Channel. It’s a short video, and well worth the watch if you want to visually understand the history of the Great Salt Lake.

It’s indisputable that the initial breakthrough drainage event at Red Rock Pass was a natural cause for the initial lake decline, and the drop from the Provo Shoreline and Gilbert Shoreline to modern levels predated the industrial revolution by thousands of years, so it would be silly to blame any of that on today’s climate change emergency. Prehistoric agriculture may have led to some of its decline, but today’s human activities are causing it to dry up at alarming rates — rates which would likely dry it up completely.

Before we get into the human-made problems impacting the lake itself, we need to look at the problems we’re creating out where Lake Bonneville used to be, which sets us on a very different course than Cabeza de Vaca.

Setting Invisible Speed Records

If you’re familiar with racing, the name Lake Bonneville probably rang a bell. The Bonneville Salt Flats west of Salt Lake City and the current Great Salt Lake are a great place to set land speed records, and they exist because Lake Bonneville dried up. The naturally flat topography is like a giant parking lot, but with no light poles and no cars parked. For decades, people have been taking their piston- and even jet-powered cars out onto the flats to go fast, with some vehicles approaching the speed of sound. Now, even EVs are getting in on the action, exceeding 200 MPH.

What all these racers didn’t know is that the salt beneath their cars was quietly and invisibly setting its own record. Instead of going fast, the salt has been going away faster than ever before.

The last time Bonneville Salt Flats was part of the Great Salt Lake and covered in water year-round was during the Little Ice Age. This was a time of wetter and colder climates, at least in the northern hemisphere, that lasted from roughly the 16th to 19th centuries.  Former ice age lakes all over North America (including the remnants of Lake Cabeza de Vaca) all had a lot more water at this time.

This little ice age seems to have been caused and ended by multiple things, but some scientists think a sudden population drop was to blame for a good chunk of the cooling. After Europeans began settling in the Americas, their diseases spread a lot faster than they did, killing off up to 90% of the native populations. Plus, this happened after diseases like the Bubonic Plague reduced Asian and European populations. This drop in carbon emissions, combined with reduced solar output and volcanic activity, set the Earth temporarily back on track into an ice age.

In the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, human populations recovered and our emissions increased at a faster rate than ever before, solar output increased again, and volcanic activity declined. The Little Ice Age cool period ended, and we started on the bad path of rapid anthropogenic climate change we are on today. As the air warmed, evaporation increased, and the Salt Lake shrunk, exposing Bonneville Salt Flats.

Before 1960, the salt on the salt flats was several feet deep, with brine (very salty water) in the mud beneath the salt. During the wetter months, this underground salty water mixes with rainwater, turning the salt flats into very shallow pools for a few months. When the rains end, the shallow water evaporates and the brine retreats to beneath the surface salt. This process suspends the salt in water every year, and when it dries up, the salty surface is almost perfectly flat and level again.

If you missed it, here is Part 1.

Continue reading in Part 3!

Featured image by NASA, showing recent space imagery of the Great Salt Lake. Public Domain.


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Jennifer Sensiba

Jennifer Sensiba is a long time efficient vehicle enthusiast, writer, and photographer. She grew up around a transmission shop, and has been experimenting with vehicle efficiency since she was 16 and drove a Pontiac Fiero. She likes to get off the beaten path in her "Bolt EAV" and any other EVs she can get behind the wheel or handlebars of with her wife and kids. You can find her on Twitter here, Facebook here, and YouTube here.

Jennifer Sensiba has 1930 posts and counting. See all posts by Jennifer Sensiba