The Great Salt Lake, already vulnerable to climate fluctuations, has been “set up to fail” by human impacts, but some of those who are making such assessments nevertheless see hopeful signs in the state’s new enthusiasm to save the vital inland sea.
The deepening lake emergency moved the Utah Legislature this year to create a $40 million program to look at ways to preserve and restore the lake.By Mark Shenefelt | Standard-ExaminerThe Great Salt Lake, already vulnerable to climate fluctuations over the ages, has been “set up to fail” by human impacts, but some of those who are making such assessments nevertheless see hopeful signs in the state’s new enthusiasm to save the vital inland sea.
“I think people are waking up to the fact that it might go away,” Baxter said. One indicator is that more people are realizing the lake has individual importance — the scenery, depicted by amateur artists who now wistfully remember closer shores; hunters prowling the lake’s fringes for generations; workers who see their livelihoods potentially evaporating; sailboat owners whose craft sit idle, unable to launch because there’s not enough water; and so on.
Baxter and others in academia have traced the Great Salt Lake’s natural and human history, hoping that their work will help to inform the ongoing conversation about the lake’s fate. Humans likely have been in Utah since the Pleistocene epoch, between 15,000 to 20,000 years ago, the high point of Lake Bonneville, according to Baxter’s manuscript, which in part draws upon the work of numerous scientists and historians.
The John C. Fremont expedition in 1843 mapped and described the region’s topography, including the lake’s islands — one of which bears his name — and reported on its mineral and biological content. In 1849, civil engineer Howard Stansbury’s team conducted a wider study of the lake’s geography, natural history, minerals and water chemistry. Stansbury also is immortalized by an island named after him.
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