If you look at a satellite image of the Great Salt Lake [1], it looks like there's a digital seam/glitch between the north and the south half of the lake. In reality, a railroad was built through the middle of the lake in 1904, separating the water. The salinity of the north half has since become toxic to all organisms except some algae and cyanobacteria.
It says that it is currently 7.0 feet below the minimum healthy water level and that the healthy water level is 4198 feet.
I bet that will confuse a lot of people who will think that means the lake should be at least 4198 feet deep and it is 7 feet below that. Being 0.17% low doesn't seem like a major problem.
Apparently though lake levels are measured relative to sea level, and Utah is around 4200 feet above sea level.
The Great Salt Lake is only about 15 feet deep when at its normal level, so 7 feet below minimum safe level is quite low.
Worse: The topography there is really flat. Every foot of lake elevation is a massive change in the surface area of the lake. I don't know the exact numbers, but it would not surprise me if there were a mile of change in lakeshore location for a foot of change of lake elevation.
Not sure about miles/foot, but an interesting example is the (newest) Great Saltair. At one point it was flooded over, now it’s about a mile and a half from the water.
I was looking at the lake water level tracker and reminiscing. I worked up at Heber City, Utah back around 1983-1984 doing seismic work. The snow and rainfall and snow-melt were creating floods all over the region. The lake was filling rapidly to historic levels.
When we moved the crew to Oregon to do a bit of work around Roseburg we drove through SLC. The runoff from some of the creeks was so high that there were sandbagged creeks flowing downhill along some of the streets directly into the lake. As we made it to the interstate to swing around the south side of the lake there was a massive effort underway to raise the Union Pacific railroad tracks above the water and to prevent the water from flooding the interstate. From memory, which may be a bit rotted over the long time period, the railroad tracks were running along what was functioning as a huge levee being constructed on the north side of the interstate. Earthmovers were scrambling everywhere. The interstate was approximately 40 feet (~12.2 m) lower than the top of the levee where the tracks were being raised. Traffic was moving carefully along this stretch. It was pretty spectacular.
I think I have some photos I took of the massive levee as I drove along that stretch and I may have some of the ballroom, the Great Saltair, which was inaccessible at the time, completely surrounded by water with only the top part of the building above water.
If anyone who was living in SLC at the time could chime in to let me know how badly my memory has served me I would appreciate it.
Once we got out of Utah we continued across Nevada and, since the entire western US was experiencing massive flooding, we had to take a long detour through a large ranch and around an isolated mountain range because an overpass over a river had washed out somewhere west of Wells, NV between there and Winnemucca. It was fantastically beautiful country. The road was unpaved and may have been a BLM road for part of the way until we connected with a paved road highway that took us back to the interstate. This detour cost us hours but the scenery made up for all of that.
I say paved only in the Lousyana sense because it was a two-lane asphalt pavement with no shoulder and minimal guardrails that snaked up the side of a large plateau. There were numerous dips and potholes in the pavement that forced you to pay attention to the road instead of enjoying the view. In Lousyana they don't bother to spend federal highway funds on interstate highway maintenance, they just buy another highway sign that says "Rough Roads Next 20 miles" and let that pass for maintenance.
About a third of the way from the top just over the crest of one of the short downhill stretches across the slope, there was a huge hole in the pavement that I hit doing about 70 in my Bronco. The jolt as my Bronco tried to jump the gap blew out both rear shocks, forcing me to replace them once I made it to Roseburg. Luckily it was a one lane wide, single hole perpendicular to the direction of travel so it didn't force a steering correction or I might've found myself needing flying lessons since the drop-off was quite sudden on one side.
That trip was pretty epic. At Denio Junction, NV, I bought gas at the small store since it was one of the last places you could gas up before crossing into Oregon. At the time and for years afterward that was the most expensive gasoline that I had ever purchased. I probably still have the trip log and receipts from that trip but I think I remember it being $3/gallon ($0.79/l), in 1983-1984. Ridiculous. I finally paid more than that for gasoline at the station on the south Rim of the Grand Canyon about 30 years later where it cost $5/gallon ($1.32/l).
My grandparents lived north of Salt Lake City, close enough that I’ve been there at least half a dozen times over several decades. Last time I did,I drove across a bridge with no water under it to an island that was fully connected to the mainland by dry land. It was very melancholy to reflect on how the natural world I grew up with is disappearing.
I think the should get the local sports teams involved. Put a little heat map down the side of the Jazz's jerseys. (I mocked this up on Twitter a few years back).
I live next to the lake (saw the remnants of it today on my bike ride).
I remember I was gunna drive out to see Spiral Jetty, but it's not a jetty right now, so what's the point, you know? And it's not like it's close to the shore or anything -- it's a mile away
I crave an industrial megaproject to solve this. Specifically: A pipeline from the ocean. But alas, only China has a social structure capable of getting projects of this scale done anymore. So I guess I'll keep tracking the AQI and keeping my kids indoors when it's bad.
I always like the idea of megaprojects and several Utah legislators suggested this. It's kind of a dumb idea, though, when you think about it because the vast majority of Utah's diverted water is going towards farming alfalfa to feed livestock, so we could much more easily solve the problem by just importing these end products from a region that is better suited to their production than a desert.
If you want to do a megaproject, just cover a significant amount of the lake in reflective material. This will reduce evaporation, increasing the lake level. It would be very bad for the ecosystem, though, since it depends on sunlight.
Or even better eliminating or at least reducing animal agriculture that aside from the ethical, health and global warming concerns, is a massive user of local resources relative to the non animal resources.
The environmental cost of building a pipeline 750 miles across the country and then expending all of the energy needed to pump that water would completely outweigh any benefits.
You also don't need ocean water. Salt doesn't evaporate. It's still there. The water could be sourced from anywhere.
They could just buy up water rights from farmers and other heavy users and divert the water in the direction of the lake. A million times easier.
It would probably be better in the long run if we all drove less and walked more, then built a 1,000 mile aqueduct from the ocean to (and I can't believe I'm typing this) replenish the Great Salt Lake.
I'm trying to figure out how driving less and walking more would result in the Great Salt Lake getting an extra million acre feet of water into it per year.
One might argue that would accelerate the collapse of the Great Salt Lake because the vast majority of diverted water is used for agriculture and increasing everyone's caloric requirements would result in more agriculture.
Driving cars releases tons of CO2 into the atmosphere (per car). There are 300 million cars on the road in the States. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
75% of U.S. adults are considered overweight, I would think that walking would first help this problem, as well as be a catalyst to other beneficial habits, including eating less meat and more vegetables, which would further reduce the amount of CO2 released from agriculture, as well as slim people's waistlines.
Ok, but this isn't climate change driven problem. Climate change will keep making this problem harder to manage, but the problem is excessive diversions of water feeding the Great Salt Lake. If climate change were solved tomorrow, this would still be a problem.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be working on climate change, but the solution for this problem must be much sooner and more local than a giant worldwide effort.
Disappointing to see you downvoted on hacker news of all places. Cmon, have some ambition.
A bunch of people here have no idea how bad the water crunch is. The oogala has been overdrawn for decades, and is a major source of agriculture water for much of the west and Midwest.
CO, UT, AZ, CA, NV etc all dramatically overdraw the Colorado river snopack and will have a reckoning soon enough. The west is also prone to mega droughts, making the problem much worse
Building a $100bn pipeline to irrigate the west absolutely should happen. We can pump it with miles of solar power, build enormous desalination plants, dramatically increase agricultural productivity and provide water to fight the heating effects of global warming.
There have been some ideas to do this from the Salton Sea to the Gulf of California in Mexico but that is about 125 miles and would still cost billions.
To replenish it. I know it was made by accident but agricultural runoff kept it from drying out. Now it is full of fertilizer and pesticide residue and the farms have gotten better at using water so less flows into the Salton Sea. As it dries up toxic dust clouds are blown over the cities nearby. California is trying to stop the dust. One idea is to fill it with sea water from the Gulf of California from Mexico.
I am not saying this is a good idea, only that it is an idea.
I think the idea is a huge waste, but the Utah State Legislature already considered exactly this in 2022 (building a massive pipeline to the Pacific Ocean).
We really should just figure out how to be sustainable. I also think there is a hard reality people don't want to even consider talking about, which is the Southwest US is too overpopulated and overleveraged for the natural water resources available to it.
Joel Ferry, the executive director of Utah's DNR retooled state laws to allow water right leasing and promoted HB187 which allows you to hold water rights without developing them.
He also happens to be a large shareholder in Bear River Canal Company and has been going around quietly buying up water rights from smaller canals and municipalities.
Grow The Flow is closely aligned with Great Salt Lake Rising (ran by the son of Mitt Romney), who plan to solve the issue ahead of the 2034 Olympics by buying up water rights from private owners. They committed $100 million of their own money, but got it matched with $300 million in state funds and a $1 billion budget line item from the Trump administration.
Be wary of environmentalism that is being driven by the wealthiest families in the state.
Not really sure what the grift is here. Great Salt Lake Rising seems pretty reasonable reading their website https://gslrising.org/
To quote:
“We are coordinating across 30+ organizations to get water back to the lake. The immediate goal: 500,000 acre-feet of annual water savings by 2027.
- Acquire and retire U.S. Magnesium water rights — 80,000 acre-feet annually
- Aggressively remove invasive phragmites consuming 100,000+ acre-feet per year
- Restore Newfoundland Basin — 30,000 acre-feet
- Partner with agricultural water users through split-season leasing and crop optimization
- Expand secondary water metering for accountability and conservation
- Purchase and lease water rights to permanently return water to the lake
- Refine policy tools to make leasing, delivery, and conservation easier”
Seems to be associated with an all star group of Utah philanthropists. Not seeing what the angle would be other than restoring the lake.
If you look at a satellite image of the Great Salt Lake [1], it looks like there's a digital seam/glitch between the north and the south half of the lake. In reality, a railroad was built through the middle of the lake in 1904, separating the water. The salinity of the north half has since become toxic to all organisms except some algae and cyanobacteria.
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1985997,-112.4903027,201762m...
Wow, this is wild to see.
It says that it is currently 7.0 feet below the minimum healthy water level and that the healthy water level is 4198 feet.
I bet that will confuse a lot of people who will think that means the lake should be at least 4198 feet deep and it is 7 feet below that. Being 0.17% low doesn't seem like a major problem.
Apparently though lake levels are measured relative to sea level, and Utah is around 4200 feet above sea level.
The Great Salt Lake is only about 15 feet deep when at its normal level, so 7 feet below minimum safe level is quite low.
Worse: The topography there is really flat. Every foot of lake elevation is a massive change in the surface area of the lake. I don't know the exact numbers, but it would not surprise me if there were a mile of change in lakeshore location for a foot of change of lake elevation.
Not sure about miles/foot, but an interesting example is the (newest) Great Saltair. At one point it was flooded over, now it’s about a mile and a half from the water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltair_(Utah)
Friend of a friend went to an ICP show at Saltair... Dressed like a traditional clown (think Bozo the Clown)
https://www.slugmag.com/community/mike-brown-the-icp-show/
I was looking at the lake water level tracker and reminiscing. I worked up at Heber City, Utah back around 1983-1984 doing seismic work. The snow and rainfall and snow-melt were creating floods all over the region. The lake was filling rapidly to historic levels.
When we moved the crew to Oregon to do a bit of work around Roseburg we drove through SLC. The runoff from some of the creeks was so high that there were sandbagged creeks flowing downhill along some of the streets directly into the lake. As we made it to the interstate to swing around the south side of the lake there was a massive effort underway to raise the Union Pacific railroad tracks above the water and to prevent the water from flooding the interstate. From memory, which may be a bit rotted over the long time period, the railroad tracks were running along what was functioning as a huge levee being constructed on the north side of the interstate. Earthmovers were scrambling everywhere. The interstate was approximately 40 feet (~12.2 m) lower than the top of the levee where the tracks were being raised. Traffic was moving carefully along this stretch. It was pretty spectacular.
I think I have some photos I took of the massive levee as I drove along that stretch and I may have some of the ballroom, the Great Saltair, which was inaccessible at the time, completely surrounded by water with only the top part of the building above water.
If anyone who was living in SLC at the time could chime in to let me know how badly my memory has served me I would appreciate it.
Once we got out of Utah we continued across Nevada and, since the entire western US was experiencing massive flooding, we had to take a long detour through a large ranch and around an isolated mountain range because an overpass over a river had washed out somewhere west of Wells, NV between there and Winnemucca. It was fantastically beautiful country. The road was unpaved and may have been a BLM road for part of the way until we connected with a paved road highway that took us back to the interstate. This detour cost us hours but the scenery made up for all of that.
I say paved only in the Lousyana sense because it was a two-lane asphalt pavement with no shoulder and minimal guardrails that snaked up the side of a large plateau. There were numerous dips and potholes in the pavement that forced you to pay attention to the road instead of enjoying the view. In Lousyana they don't bother to spend federal highway funds on interstate highway maintenance, they just buy another highway sign that says "Rough Roads Next 20 miles" and let that pass for maintenance.
About a third of the way from the top just over the crest of one of the short downhill stretches across the slope, there was a huge hole in the pavement that I hit doing about 70 in my Bronco. The jolt as my Bronco tried to jump the gap blew out both rear shocks, forcing me to replace them once I made it to Roseburg. Luckily it was a one lane wide, single hole perpendicular to the direction of travel so it didn't force a steering correction or I might've found myself needing flying lessons since the drop-off was quite sudden on one side.
That trip was pretty epic. At Denio Junction, NV, I bought gas at the small store since it was one of the last places you could gas up before crossing into Oregon. At the time and for years afterward that was the most expensive gasoline that I had ever purchased. I probably still have the trip log and receipts from that trip but I think I remember it being $3/gallon ($0.79/l), in 1983-1984. Ridiculous. I finally paid more than that for gasoline at the station on the south Rim of the Grand Canyon about 30 years later where it cost $5/gallon ($1.32/l).
Good times.
My grandparents lived north of Salt Lake City, close enough that I’ve been there at least half a dozen times over several decades. Last time I did,I drove across a bridge with no water under it to an island that was fully connected to the mainland by dry land. It was very melancholy to reflect on how the natural world I grew up with is disappearing.
I think the should get the local sports teams involved. Put a little heat map down the side of the Jazz's jerseys. (I mocked this up on Twitter a few years back).
I live next to the lake (saw the remnants of it today on my bike ride).
I remember I was gunna drive out to see Spiral Jetty, but it's not a jetty right now, so what's the point, you know? And it's not like it's close to the shore or anything -- it's a mile away
https://www.sltrib.com/news/2022/06/26/spiral-jetty-baromete...
I crave an industrial megaproject to solve this. Specifically: A pipeline from the ocean. But alas, only China has a social structure capable of getting projects of this scale done anymore. So I guess I'll keep tracking the AQI and keeping my kids indoors when it's bad.
I always like the idea of megaprojects and several Utah legislators suggested this. It's kind of a dumb idea, though, when you think about it because the vast majority of Utah's diverted water is going towards farming alfalfa to feed livestock, so we could much more easily solve the problem by just importing these end products from a region that is better suited to their production than a desert.
Doesn’t scratch the itch, but I will concede that this is a fair point
If you want to do a megaproject, just cover a significant amount of the lake in reflective material. This will reduce evaporation, increasing the lake level. It would be very bad for the ecosystem, though, since it depends on sunlight.
Sounds like the northern part of the lake doesn't have much of an ecosystem anyway, so why not start there?
Or even better eliminating or at least reducing animal agriculture that aside from the ethical, health and global warming concerns, is a massive user of local resources relative to the non animal resources.
> Specifically: A pipeline from the ocean.
The environmental cost of building a pipeline 750 miles across the country and then expending all of the energy needed to pump that water would completely outweigh any benefits.
You also don't need ocean water. Salt doesn't evaporate. It's still there. The water could be sourced from anywhere.
They could just buy up water rights from farmers and other heavy users and divert the water in the direction of the lake. A million times easier.
The US is crisscrossed with gas and oil pipelines, many of them quite long. It’s imagination that constrains us mostly, not technology.
It would probably be better in the long run if we all drove less and walked more, then built a 1,000 mile aqueduct from the ocean to (and I can't believe I'm typing this) replenish the Great Salt Lake.
I'm trying to figure out how driving less and walking more would result in the Great Salt Lake getting an extra million acre feet of water into it per year.
One might argue that would accelerate the collapse of the Great Salt Lake because the vast majority of diverted water is used for agriculture and increasing everyone's caloric requirements would result in more agriculture.
Driving cars releases tons of CO2 into the atmosphere (per car). There are 300 million cars on the road in the States. CO2 is a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change.
75% of U.S. adults are considered overweight, I would think that walking would first help this problem, as well as be a catalyst to other beneficial habits, including eating less meat and more vegetables, which would further reduce the amount of CO2 released from agriculture, as well as slim people's waistlines.
Ok, but this isn't climate change driven problem. Climate change will keep making this problem harder to manage, but the problem is excessive diversions of water feeding the Great Salt Lake. If climate change were solved tomorrow, this would still be a problem.
I'm not saying we shouldn't be working on climate change, but the solution for this problem must be much sooner and more local than a giant worldwide effort.
Disappointing to see you downvoted on hacker news of all places. Cmon, have some ambition.
A bunch of people here have no idea how bad the water crunch is. The oogala has been overdrawn for decades, and is a major source of agriculture water for much of the west and Midwest.
CO, UT, AZ, CA, NV etc all dramatically overdraw the Colorado river snopack and will have a reckoning soon enough. The west is also prone to mega droughts, making the problem much worse
Building a $100bn pipeline to irrigate the west absolutely should happen. We can pump it with miles of solar power, build enormous desalination plants, dramatically increase agricultural productivity and provide water to fight the heating effects of global warming.
There have been some ideas to do this from the Salton Sea to the Gulf of California in Mexico but that is about 125 miles and would still cost billions.
To drain the Salton Sea or replenish it? The Salton Sea was created in its present form from a man-made environmental disaster.
To replenish it. I know it was made by accident but agricultural runoff kept it from drying out. Now it is full of fertilizer and pesticide residue and the farms have gotten better at using water so less flows into the Salton Sea. As it dries up toxic dust clouds are blown over the cities nearby. California is trying to stop the dust. One idea is to fill it with sea water from the Gulf of California from Mexico.
I am not saying this is a good idea, only that it is an idea.
I think the idea is a huge waste, but the Utah State Legislature already considered exactly this in 2022 (building a massive pipeline to the Pacific Ocean).
https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2022/05/19/utah-legi... (archived non-paywall version: http://archive.today/GzuUD)
We really should just figure out how to be sustainable. I also think there is a hard reality people don't want to even consider talking about, which is the Southwest US is too overpopulated and overleveraged for the natural water resources available to it.
THIS IS A GRIFT.
Joel Ferry, the executive director of Utah's DNR retooled state laws to allow water right leasing and promoted HB187 which allows you to hold water rights without developing them.
He also happens to be a large shareholder in Bear River Canal Company and has been going around quietly buying up water rights from smaller canals and municipalities.
Grow The Flow is closely aligned with Great Salt Lake Rising (ran by the son of Mitt Romney), who plan to solve the issue ahead of the 2034 Olympics by buying up water rights from private owners. They committed $100 million of their own money, but got it matched with $300 million in state funds and a $1 billion budget line item from the Trump administration.
Be wary of environmentalism that is being driven by the wealthiest families in the state.
Not really sure what the grift is here. Great Salt Lake Rising seems pretty reasonable reading their website https://gslrising.org/
To quote: “We are coordinating across 30+ organizations to get water back to the lake. The immediate goal: 500,000 acre-feet of annual water savings by 2027.
- Acquire and retire U.S. Magnesium water rights — 80,000 acre-feet annually
- Aggressively remove invasive phragmites consuming 100,000+ acre-feet per year
- Restore Newfoundland Basin — 30,000 acre-feet
- Partner with agricultural water users through split-season leasing and crop optimization
- Expand secondary water metering for accountability and conservation
- Purchase and lease water rights to permanently return water to the lake
- Refine policy tools to make leasing, delivery, and conservation easier”
Seems to be associated with an all star group of Utah philanthropists. Not seeing what the angle would be other than restoring the lake.
Can you spell out how the grift works? All I'm understanding from your post is that wealthy people are connected to the effort.