What will they call Salt Lake City when the Salt Lake is gone?
Isn’t it already Salt Pond City.
I guess next is Salt Puddle City, then maybe Salt Plains City?
I’ve been clanging the alarm bells about the GSL for a couple decades now, but I’m pretty skeptical of claims that it will be gone in five years. That’s not to say there’s not an ecological crisis because there certainly is that and we do need to take urgent measures.
And my vote for naming the region would be the Arscenic Valley. :)
Salt Pan City? Next to the Great Salt Pan?
Death Valley is already taken.
Out of curiosity, what would the direct impacts on SLC be from the lake drying up? Like how would that effect water supplies, temperatures, all that?
Some info here
It’s an extremely salty terminal lake, so it drying up probably wouldn’t impact water supplies directly, irrigation and diversions occur as the water flows into the lake (and is one of the reasons aside from the megadrought that it’s suffering). The lake does generate localized lake effect snow in the winter but I don’t think it’s a substantial amount from a precipitation point of view.
The largest impacts are going to be environmental and ecological. The wetlands around the lake are crucial to a lot of migratory birds and if it dies I’m really worried what the impact there is going to be once millions of birds lose their oasis.
Environmentally, it could be a disaster. There is a lot of naturally-occurring arsenic and some heavy metals that are bound up in the lake and under thick crust. If the lake goes, that crust is going to break down and turn into toxic particles that we’re all going to be breathing in here. As you may already know, we suffer air quality issues particularly in the winter due to the valley being a “bowl” and temperature inversions trapping air in the valley. Dust particles from the lake combined with that would be… not good.
There are economic impacts as well. Industry related to the lake generates over a billion dollars in revenue a year which isn’t small potatoes for a state of 3.3 million people.
I was shocked when I flew in to ski at Alta, must have been 20 years ago. From the air the sky at Salt Lake City reminded me of Mubai.
Yep, it’s like putting 2.6 million people (and their homes, cars, industry, etc.) in a bowl and then clamping an air-tight lid on it for a week or more at a time. Visually, it looks even worse because fog gets trapped in the valley, mixing with the already bad air. We can have some bad air quality days in the summer as well but visibility remains pretty good.
Being up in the resorts, you can look down and see the line where the cold air is sitting! I love escaping to Park City or elsewhere in the mountains when an inversion drags on but the descent back to the valley is always depressing. :)
Mediocre Salt Flat
For an optimistic take from someone who’s lived around SLC most of his life, I’m actually encouraged because people are finally, finally, treating it like a serious issue. For 20+ years I’ve been shouting (metaphorically speaking… most of the time) at people that it’s a serious problem that needs to be addressed, but I’d be lucky if I could get as much of a shrug. If there was any discussion of the lake at all it was from environmentalists talking about the importance of the wetlands for migratory birds and that’s a pretty easy thing for an industry-friendly Republican government/populace to shrug off and ignore.
There are some steps that we can take that will help, the easiest of which (from a technical implementation point of view if not political) is conservation. And I’m not talking about households having less lawn although that would also help. We use a staggering amount of water in growing thirsty crops like alfalfa all throughout Central Utah. And if anyone has had the, uh… pleasure… of driving through central Utah, it’s probably clear that it ain’t exactly a place to grow a lot of thirsty crops. Of course, our governor is one such alfalfa farmer so we’ll see what happens on that front.
Diverting less water that feeds into the lake is going to be key and as the population continues to grow, it’s going to get harder. We have a LOT of room to improve in this area, though. We absolutely suck at water usage because it’s not something that we’ve had to deal with for now. Las Vegas kicks ass in this area and there’s a lot we can learn/implement from them.
Thankfully, we’re getting pummeled with a lot of the storm systems that @Matt_W’s map of California demonstrates. One very promising start to a water year isn’t going to break the drought but it’s sure going to help in the short term. One can hope it gives us a little breathing room, even if I’m skeptical Republican leadership will take great advantage of it.
One of the worst developments in US political culture over the last 50 or so years is tying anti-environmentalism with religiosity / culture war politics. This feels like to save the planet we have let the religious win and turn the US into Gilead- at that point, after having won the culture war, can decouple environmentalism from liberalism.
I think the problem is that there isn’t going to be enough water for drinking and washing, much less agriculture; and therefore probably none at all for refilling and stabilizing the lake. Maybe not tomorrow, but someday, and that seems to be the likely forecast for all the southwest / western desert cities. They may well remain (barely) habitable, but they’re going to be environmental disasters.
Las Vegas may be doing great at conservation, but the Lake Mead issues are still extremely dramatic and could severely impact Vegas:
Your description of the geography sounds a lot like the San Joaquin Valley. A bathtub with million plus people living in it.
Quick, JMJ, deploy that mighty organ and start pissing some of that water back into the ground.
“The City of Pure Water” is running out of water and pumping so much out of the ground that it’s getting sinkholey.
It’s in the Zephyrhills plastic bottles filled from the community’s sparkling springs and sold in supermarkets nationwide.
The fact that they don’t have a space in the name of the town, and just combined it into Zephyrhills, makes it look like the name of an STD.
When we’re not busy wasting and over consuming it, we’re also polluting it with forever chemicals that are likely carcinogenic: