Dust Storms From Great Salt Lake Roll Into Towns, Bringing Hazardous Chemicals

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I’ve just finished watching a British limited series called Toxic Town. The four-one hour episodes chronicle how in 1984 the town council of Corby, northwest of London, attempted to decontaminate a closed steel manufacturing plant property. In a rush to remove poisonous sludge and resuscitate industry and employment, they spread dust particles throughout the air. Pregnant women breathed in the dust, and their children were born with deformities.

The contamination and environmental devastation is not rare; a 2025 global map of toxic metals in soils shows that vast swaths of land are contaminated from a combination of factors including industrial pollution and the erosion of bedrock.

One area in the US that’s come under recent scrutiny for heavy metal contamination is the Great Salt Lake, which was submerged 16 feet underwater just five decades ago. Today the cracked, gray expanse of earth often stirs up dust storms, and the swirling mass — filled with miniature, gravel-like amounts of arsenic and other carcinogenic metals — tumbles toward the shore, engulfing nearby towns.

When the lake bed is exposed, as it has been this year, the accumulated metals in sediment are picked up by winds and create toxic dust storms.

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Our ancient ancestors learned to smelt ore to extract metal as long ago as 10,000 years in our past. In doing so, they acquiesced to a level of necessary toxicity to create powerful tools. Yesterday’s copper arrowheads have evolved into today’s rocket engines, yet the millennia of mining have created a Faustian residue of pollution and human health hazards.

Dozens of dust events probably happen each year across the 120-square-mile playa once covered by the Great Salt Lake, although a Washington Post exposé indicates that there are no comprehensive state or federal records of them. That means there’s no mechanism in place to track the long-term effects they are having on Utah’s residents.

Heavy metals in dust storms can enter the human body through ingestion, inhalation and dermal contact. They can cause irreparable and negative impacts on human health including bronchitis, asthma, lung cancer, respiratory problems, infertility, cardiovascular diseases, and nervous system interruptions.

Historically Low Levels of the Great Salt Lake

The 1963 US Clean Air Act, reduction in mining activity beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, and improved pollution control technologies have, across the US, contributed to a decline in surface metal concentrations by two to five fold since the 1960s.

The Utah Division of Air Quality monitors air quality and conducts research to understand dust from the Great Salt Lake, which has been described as the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere. The counties near the lake have six federally regulated air quality monitors that track lake dust but don’t analyze its composition. Consumptive water uses, water diversions, drought, and heat have lowered the lake’s elevation, reduced its volume, and decreased its area.

As a result, there are over 750 square miles of newly exposed lake bed. These record low water levels have prompted the state legislature to enact laws aimed at conserving water.

The ecosystem of the Great Salt Lake receives industrial, urban, mining, and agricultural discharge from a growing population exceeding two million people. Toxic metals reach the Great Salt Lake predominantly by way of runoff and atmospheric pollution. Metals in the lake bed can be transported with dust, a potential problem for neighboring ecosystems, human health, and even the region’s snow pack.

As a terminal lake with no outlet, the Great Salt Lake retains the elements and compounds that reach it. Lake sediments — especially in terminal (endorheic) basins — are a repository for environmental and anthropogenic contaminants. Heavy metals are among the most problematic pollutants due to their persistence, toxicity, and bioaccumulation.

Due to the shallow shoreline of the Great Salt Lake, all it takes are small changes in elevation to produce large effects of exposed lake bed sediment. Up until recently, wetland plants have absorbed metals from the soil and stored them below ground (in roots, bulbs, and rhizomes) or above ground (in shoots, leaves, and seeds).

Dust plumes originating from exposed lake bed have had a significant impact on local air quality and have contained heavy metals that are likely to pose a threat to human health. Additionally, there are now large-scale contributions of dust flux from the dry lake bed of the Great Salt Lake to the surrounding areas, including the Wasatch Front, the Uinta Mountains, and the Wasatch Mountains.

Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Utah, told lawmakers there is still much more research needed to fully understand the dust carried out of the dried Great Salt Lake. The lake bed contains levels of arsenic, lanthanum, lithium, zirconium, copper and other metals above the Environmental Protection Agency’s residential and industrial standards. Of those, arsenic, which can increase the risk of a few diseases when there is chronic exposure, has the highest levels compared to EPA standards, according to Perry.

A Utah-based research team has concluded that mitigating active contributions to the lake does not necessarily affect legacy sediments — the metals already in place need to be addressed separately from strategies that prevent additional contamination. Metal concentrations in shallow benthic zones of the Great Salt Lake were recorded during a record low year of lake elevation. The resulting 2024 analysis indicates:

1. regulatory strategies are helping to reduce toxic elements in surface sediment;
2. the source of contamination depends on the metal; and,
3. several questions remain unanswered concerning sequestration by the deep brine layer and how low elevation/high salinity impacts the distribution of metals in the GSL system.

“As water-policy strategies are implemented in the coming years and lake elevation waxes and wanes,” the authors note, “it will be important to continue to monitor metal levels to see how they are affected.” Moreover, as demand grows for critical minerals to build everything from batteries to wind turbines, the US and other countries should test more soil, more frequently for toxic metals.

“The big picture is we’re in trouble with the lake right now,” Perry added. “This is not a problem that might happen in the future. The lake is three-fourths of the way gone today, and we really, really need to have a sustained focus on it over a longer period of time.”

Featured image: Farmington Bay, Antelope Island and the Great Salt Lake by pedrik (CC BY 2.0 license).