Logan Stefanich is a reporter with KSL, covering southern Utah communities, education, business and tech news.
SALT LAKE CITY — The declining water levels of the Great Salt Lake have exposed 800 square miles of lake playa, becoming a major cause of concern and source of dust pollution blowing into Utah 's population centers.
But in a first-of-its-kind breakthrough that could have major implications for mitigating that pollution, geophysicists at the University of Utah used electromagnetic data from airborne surveys to locate a deep, freshwater reservoir under Farmington Bay.The study demonstrated the ability of airborne electromagnetic survey methods to detect freshwater beneath the thin layer of conductive salt water at the surface of the Great Salt Lake, lead author Michael Zhdanov explained."We were able to answer the question of how deep this potential reservoir is, and what its spatial extent is beneath the eastern lake margin. If you know how deep, you know how wide, you know the porous space, you can calculate the potential freshwater volume," said Zhdanov, a distinguished professor of geology and geophysics at the U. and director of the Consortium for Electromagnetic Modeling and Inversion.An analysis of the data recorded through the survey method — which involved dangling electromagnetic equipment from a helicopter and flying in 10 east-west survey lines over Farmington Bay and the northern part of Antelope Island — showed fresh water saturates the sediments beneath the lake's hypersaline surface to depths of about 10,000 to 13,000 feet. A helicopter lifts off from Antelope Island carrying electromagnetic survey equipment for a geophysical data-gathering mission over Farmington Bay in February 2025. The results of the study in February were published in the Nature-affiliated journal Scientific Reports, building on a larger research project led by the Unversity of Utah Department of Geology and Geophysics and funded by the Utah Department of Natural Resources to understand the groundwater beneath Great Salt Lake.Zhdanov said the appearance of circular phragmites mounds on the dried-out bed of Farmington Bay, each 50 to 100 meters in diameter and covered with 15-foot-tall thickets of reeds, catalyzed these studies."These very strange plants — they use a lot of fresh water. So, where does this water come from? It looks like this water comes from underground," Zhdanov said.Of course, this discovery could have tremendous implications for mitigating toxic metal-laden dust pollution from the lake's dried
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