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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.