Great Salt Lake is the remnant of Lake Bonneville; a great ice age lake that rose dramatically from a small saline lake 30,000 years ago.
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It was called Lake Bonneville, and northern Utah, southern Idaho, northern Nevada was all underwater, a freshwater lake. But as the Earth warmed up, ice dams broke, and water evaporated, and all the water seeping out left behind this salty puddle in the bottom of the bathtub, and that's what we call Great Salt Lake.
The best place to swim or float in the lake is at Antelope Island State Park, where white oolitic sand beaches provide easy access to the lake without the brine flies that are prevalent on other areas of the shoreline. The beach area also has showers to rinse off the salty water.
The Great Salt Lake is home to many important biological and wildlife species, from archaea, to bacteria, to phytoplankton (400+ species). Perhaps the three most apparent species that can be seen with the naked eye are brine shrimp (tons), brine flies (billions) and birds (millions).
However, the most deleterious effect of the Great Salt Lake drying up is that the air surrounding Salt Lake City could sporadically become poisonous. Since the bed of the Great Salt Lake holds high levels of dangerous particles like arsenic, antimony, copper, zirconium, and various heavy metals.
Why is the Dead Sea so salty? Much of the salt content of the Dead Sea comes from the rocks eroding on the shores. The shores are made up of rock salt and other rocks with a high mineral content. As the rocks and the salt erodes from the shores the stuff that makes up the rocks ends up in the water.
The state of Utah owns basically most of the Great Salt Lake, including Antelope Island, Fremont Island, Gunnison Island, the Ogden and Farmington bay wetland areas, along with the entire lakebed.
After the ice age the earth's climate became drier and Lake Bonneville gradually receded to form Great Salt Lake. Great Salt Lake is too saline to support fish and most other aquatic species. Several types of algae live in the lake. Brine shrimp and brine flies can tolerate the high salt content and feed on the algae.
The saltiest of the Great Salt Lake's water sits on the bottom of the lake. The heavy brine traps organic material (i.e., algae and plant and animal remains) and gases at the bottom of the lake.
The 1,700 square miles of various water environments, remote islands and shorelines, with Utah's highest density of wetlands, provide habitat for plants, brine shrimp, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, shorebirds and waterfowl. Birds rely on the lake, a critical link in the Pacific Flyway between North and South America.
On average, the Great Salt Lake water level will rise and fall by roughly two feet each year, with runoff and inflow replacing what evaporates in the summer. With poor snowpack levels in 2021 and 2022 and record heat in the Summer of 2022, this hasn't been the case.
Even when the water temperature is in the 20's (°F), the lake does not freeze, due to the high salt content of the water; but icebergs have been ob- served floating on the lake's surface, formed from freshwater that flows into the lake from tributaries and freezes on the surface before it mixes with the brine.
A new scientific report warns the lake is on track to disappear in the next five years, unless water use is cut by as much as 50% annually. I don't know of any other environmental threat that's moving this quickly, said Bonnie Baxter, a Westminster College biochemist and one of the authors of that study.
Already, the lake has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area, as trillions of litres of water are diverted away from it to supply farms and homes. As a result, the lake is becoming saltier and uninhabitable to native flies and brine shrimp.
The precipitous drop in water levels, which has shrunk the Great Salt Lake's footprint by half in the last decades, stems from a two-fold problem: Climate change has decimated the mountain streams that feed the lake, while demand for that same freshwater has ballooned for new development, agriculture and industry.
Most recent data within water-surface elevations show a downward trend. With climate change and Utah's ever growing human population, we expect this negative trend to continue. In fact, it is estimated that the lake is 11 feet lower due to human diversions.
The shallow bottom of Great Salt Lake supports a microbial carpet that harness the sun's energy through the process of photosynthesis. This carpet is made up of a community of microbes, including several types of cyanobacteria (also known as blue-green algae), algae and other organisms.