Utah is losing more than water as the Great Salt Lake shrinks — it’s also losing snow faster.
The team collected snow samples from a plot adjacent to Alta Ski Resort and found that storms deposited substantial amounts of dust 16 times during the 2022 snowmelt season. After calculating where the dust came from during each storm based on wind direction and atmospheric conditions, the team found that Great Salt Lake contributed nearly a quarter of the total dust to the study site. It also released the most dust relative to the lake’s exposed surface area.
A record amount of dust coated snow at the Atwater Study Plot near Alta, Utah, in spring of 2022. The dust speeded up snowmelt by 17 days.“The future of Utah is going to be drier,” says Patrick Belmont, a hydrologist at Utah State University in Logan who was not part of the study. Earlier snowmelt causes the landscape to dry out faster, creating “a feedback loop that’s hard to break out of,” he explains.
A smaller lake also means less winter snow, Belmont says, as evaporation from Great Salt Lake contributes up to 10 percent of the snowpack in the Wasatch range. “Unless we make some big policy changes, we should expect to see a much lower Great Salt Lake, and it’s very possible that we lose the lake altogether.”
Skiles and her colleagues plan to keep monitoring the snowpack and to use remote sensing to see if dust is impacting snow across all of the mountains that drain into the Great Salt Lake. “We need more years of data to understand if this is the new normal,” she says.
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