Great Salt Lake, Utah: A landmark evaporates

Drought and excessive water consumption are causing the Great Salt Lake in Utah to shrink. Its disappearance becomes a danger to nature, people and the economy.

It doesn’t happen every day. The governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, reaches out in an emotional speech to the citizens of his state – and implores them to pray for rain:

We need divine intervention. I ask Utahner, regardless of belief, to pray with me for a weekend.

It is the last resort, desperate. Cox has declared a drought emergency and appealed to citizens to save water. But nothing helped.

Morass instead of sailing area

This is particularly noticeable at one point: Utah’s landmark, the Great Salt Lake, is barely recognizable. The majestic blue-green-red salt lake normally extends over an area about twice the size of the Saarland. Now it resembles a sad brown puddle. A video from Associated Press shows: Where else sailors dress their boats up, they now haul them out of the mud.

“It’s crane day,” says this sailor. “We’re pulling the boats out because there’s no more water to sail. Before they get stuck in the mud.”

Climate change and water consumption threaten the lake

The lake is at its lowest level since records began 170 years ago. The development was foreseeable: Because the salt lake is shallow, it evaporates quickly in the heat, fueled by climate change.

At the same time, there is hardly any water, because the Utahners use too much – on average around five times more per capita than the Germans. The water from the rivers that once fed the Great Salt Lake barely arrives.

The consequences are massive, explains scientist Jaimi Butler from the Great Salt Lake Institute: “Important deposits and shrimp are dying out, the food for around ten million birds and migratory birds.” There are 338 species that live on the lake.

“Their nests, too, such as those of pelicans, are increasingly unprotected from predators such as coyotes because they are hardly surrounded by water. The black-necked grebes are even threatened with extinction,” warns Butler.

A downright poisonous drought

The drying up of the lake initially has health consequences for people, says Butler in a Zoom interview: “The bank bed is littered with salt and minerals and particles that the human lungs cannot process. Sometimes there is also arsenic or mercury. The wind carries then to the cities. ”

The air quality there decreases accordingly. Respiratory diseases can be the result. And: the wind carries the dust and particles into the mountains, onto the snow. The otherwise bright white areas that attract tourists from all over the world to ski no longer reflect sunlight. It gets hot under the brown-black particles and the snow melts. What remains are mud, minerals and toxins.

It’s all the worse for the state of Utah because many companies make a living from tourism, says Butler. Every year the lake guarantees more than two billion dollars in income and thousands of jobs that make up the local economy.

At this point, Butler agrees with Governor Cox: If everyone doesn’t work on a quick solution now, the region is at risk of an environmental, cultural and economic catastrophe.