“We will do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn’t happen.” Cox, who previously requested Utahns pray to help alleviate the worst drought to grip the US west in the past 1,200 years, has suspended any new claims for water in the Great Salt Lake basin. “On my watch we are not allowing the lake to go dry,” Spencer Cox, Utah’s governor, has vowed. Haunted by these prognostications, Utah’s Republican leadership has responded with hundreds of millions of dollars in ameliorative measures and pugnacious rhetoric. But we have to start within one year, we have have to take the action now.” “The prognosis isn’t good unless there’s massive action. “History won’t have to judge us, not even our kids will have to judge us – we will judge ourselves in short order,” said Erin Mendenhall, the mayor of Salt Lake City, who is now regularly bombarded with questions about the toxic dust cloud from mayors of other cities. The Great Salt Lake, its equilibrium upended by the voracious diversion of water to nourish crops, flush toilets and water lawns and zapped by global heating, could vanish in just five years, a timeline Abbott admits seems “absurd”. “But these systems are actually very, very delicate,” said Abbott, and they can quickly spiral away. The demise of the Aral Sea was dumfounding to many Soviets, who thought it virtually impossible to doom a lake so large just by watering some nearby cotton. But the sheer heft of the Great Salt Lake, sometimes called ‘America’s Dead Sea’ but in fact four times larger than its counterpart that straddles Israel and Jordan, presages a loss on the scale of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake but strangled to death by Soviet irrigation projects. The Great Salt Lake’s predicament is often compared to that of the dried-up Owens Lake in California, one of the worst sources of dust pollution in the US since the water feeding it was rerouted to Los Angeles more than a century ago. ![]() As some people have said, it’s an environmental nuclear bomb.”Īlvin Sihapanya, a research student at Westminster College, looks in the water of the Great Salt Lake. “I mean, they are directly down wind from this. We’re just seeing the front end of it now.” About 2.4 million people, or about 80% of Utah’s population, lives “within a stone’s throw of the lake”, Abbott said. ![]() “We are seeing this freight train coming as the lake shrinks. ![]() “People have seen and realized it’s not hypothetical and that there is a real threat to our entire way of life,” Abbott said. ![]() Abbott now regularly fields fretful phone calls from people asking if Salt Lake City is safe to live in still, or if their offspring should steer clear of the University of Utah. There is evidence that plumes of toxic dust are already stirring as the exposed salt crust on the lake, which has lost three-quarters of its water and has shriveled by nearly two-thirds in size since the Mormon wagon train first arrived here in the mid-19th century, breaks apart from erosion. “We could expect to see thousands of excess deaths annually from the increase in air pollution and the collapse of the largest wetland oasis in the intermountain west,” he added. Ben Abbott on a mound of bleached and exposed microbialites at the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
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