Click the link to read the article on The Deseret News website (Amy Joi O’Donoghue). Here’s an excerpt:
Like its “sister” lakes in the sprawling Great Basin that cover 200,000 square miles, Utah’s Great Salt Lake appears to be on a collision course withnature plagued by diversions, drought and climate change. It has lost close to half its volume, and more than 800 square miles of lakebed are now exposed, vulnerable to wind-whipped storms that spread toxic dust along the Wasatch Front.
These saline lakes in the Great Basin are terminal, meaning they are fed by rivers and are a hydrologic endpoint. When the rivers start to dry up or are diverted, the lakes’ levels of salinity increase. The saline lakes of the Great Basin are remnants of the ice age and are echoes of Lake Bonneville and Lake Lahontan, another large endorheic Pleistocene lake that covered modern northwestern Nevada and extended into northeastern California and southern Oregon. That concern [the long-term viability of the lakes], O’Leary added, is what is leading to a multitude of studies to better understand the hydrological challenges faced by these systems. There is modeling that is focused on groundwater and surface water.
“There are limited resources and money that go into these decisions, but those decisions will involve these lakes that affect people’s livelihoods and communities,” he said. “The hope is that, with the science, we can make informed, intelligent decisions moving forward.”
“We know a lot already. We’ve seen what happened with Owens Lake. We know that dust is a huge problem. We know that there’s a high level of arsenic that could be put into our air along the Wasatch Front, and we don’t want that,” [Blake] Moore said. “It’s a matter of really pinpointing the severity of it. We want to use the study to help do that and then take best practices and come up with new innovative ideas on how to address the issue.”