The soil contains arsenic, antimony, copper, zirconium and other dangerous heavy metals, much of it residue from mining activity in the region. He picked at the earth, the color of dried mud, like a beach whose tide went out and never came back. One morning in March, Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, walked out onto land that used to be underwater. While the ecosystem hasn’t collapsed yet, Dr. Baxter says will happen this summer - the algae in the water will struggle, threatening the brine shrimp that consume it. But as the water in the lake drops, its salt content has increased. The salt content in the part of the lake closest to Salt Lake City used to fluctuate between 9 percent and 12 percent, according to Bonnie Baxter, a biology professor at Westminster College. The lake’s surface area, which covered about 3,300 square miles in the late 1980s, has since shrunk to less than 1,000, according to the U.S. Last summer, the water level in the Great Salt Lake reached its lowest point on record, and it’s likely to fall further this year. Gillies said, “you don’t have industry, you don’t have agriculture, you don’t have life.” ‘At the precipice’ As storms pass over the Great Salt Lake, they absorb some of its moisture, which then falls as snow in the mountains. In summer, evaporation would cause the lake to drop about two feet in spring, as the snowpack melted, the rivers would replenish it.Īnd a shrinking lake means less snow. Until recently, that hydrological system existed in a delicate balance.
Snow that falls in the mountains just east of Salt Lake City feeds three rivers - the Jordan, Weber, and Bear - which provide water for the cities and towns of the Wasatch Front, as well as the rich cropland nearby, before flowing into the Great Salt Lake. That megacity is possible because of a minor hydrological miracle. Extending roughly from Provo in the south to Brigham City in the north, with Salt Lake City at its center, it’s one of the fastest-growing urban areas in America - home to 2.5 million people, drawn by the natural beauty and relatively modest cost of living. Utahns call that metropolis the Wasatch Front, after the 12,000-foot Wasatch Range above it. At the edge of that oasis, between the city and the desert, is the Great Salt Lake. But keep going east, and just shy of Wyoming you would find a modern oasis: a narrow strip of green, stretching some 100 miles from north to south, home to an uninterrupted metropolis beneath snow-capped mountains, sheltered under maple and pear trees.