Great Salt Lake Tracker

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...

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.

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 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 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...

The Great Salt Lake remains for my brothers and I one of the vilest places we have ever visited on Earth. The smell of rotting flies we will never forget. An ecosystem of filth and putrification. If you’ve never been there, you can’t imagine what a place worse than Mordor would be like. I assume it wasn’t always like this? It would be great if they reversed the water loss, but I’m not optimistic. I assume it will eventually just be a toxic dust plain where the lake used to be, an Aral Sea for America as a reminder that we didn’t do a single fruitful thing about climate change.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea

What is the call to action?

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.

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.