Click the link to read the article on The Salt Lake Tribune website (Leia Larsen). Here’s an excerpt:
The Bonneville Salt Flats west of the Great Salt Lake are so flat that racers can drive at mind-boggling speeds that break the sound barrier. But the expanse of salty crust began rapidly receding in the 1980s and hasn’t stopped. In just 30 years, the salt flats shrunk from 50 square miles to 35 square miles. They lost a third of their volume. The racing community pointed at nearby groundwater pumping for potash mining as the culprit, so in the late 1990s, land managers approved a process called “laydown” — mixing all the leftover mining salts with groundwater and flooding it across the flats in an effort to help the crust regrow…
Turns out, groundwater extraction — including the pumping done for brine laydown — has dramatically changed the aquifer beneath the salt flats. The subterranean water that built up the salt pan over thousands of years is now flowing away from the flats, carrying the salt away with it. Researchers published their findings in the Utah Geological Association Journal on Jan. 14. The site the potash company used to pump water for the laydown process was on the edge of the flats, next to the Silver Island Mountains. Supporters of the project may not have realized the water it extracted was linked to the aquifer beneath the shrinking salt crust.