Have you ever wondered why there are so many salty lakes in the West? It's all about the Great Basin's unique geography.
Like its sister lakes in the sprawling Great Basin, Utah’s Great Salt Lake appears to be on a collision course with nature plagued by diversions, drought and climate change.
These saline lakes in the Great Basin are terminal, meaning they are fed by rivers and are a hydrologic endpoint. When the rivers start to dry up or are diverted, the lakes’ levels of salinity increase.The saline lakes of the Great Basin are remnants of the ice age and are echoes of Lake Bonneville and Lake Lahontan, another large endorheic Pleistocene lake that covered modern northwestern Nevada and extended into northeastern California and southern Oregon.
“These lakes tend to be what are called terminal discharge points where water, either surface or groundwater, is the end of the flow path. Typically the only way for water to leave is through evaporation, and that leads to the saline buildup,” he said. “There is a concern for the long-term viability of these lakes.”
To better understand these sprawling saline lake systems in the Great Basin, a bipartisan effort is underway in Congress to launch more research. “We know a lot already. We’ve seen what happened with Owens Lake. We know that dust is a huge problem. We know that there’s a high level of arsenic that could be put into our air along the Wasatch Front, and we don’t want that,” Moore said. “It’s a matter of really pinpointing the severity of it. We want to use the study to help do that and then take best practices and come up with new innovative ideas on how to address the issue.
Twenty saline lakes across California, Nevada, Oregon and Utah were identified by the U.S. Geological Survey and its partners as priority ecosystems.
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