“The Utah department of natural resources announced the Great Salt Lake had reached a record low last fall. Lake levels were expected to continue to drop, with scientists and researchers cautioning in a January report that the lake could dry up in less than five years due to excessive water use and a worsening climate crisis.” The article explains, though, that after our really wet winter this past year the water levels are not at a dangerously low level anymore. We had one of the wettest winters in Utah’s history, and although it caused damage to roads and provoked some avalanche danger, the lake is no longer at the dangerous stage we were so worried about.
The water levels were even coming close to the other extreme. We got so much snow that there was stress about the safety of the citizens living in our state. ‘“Up until this week, the big concern for the canyons has been the tremendous amount of snowfall we have received,” Gleason said. “Now the concern has shifted to warm temperatures and sun that’s melting some of that snowpack, and making it much denser. During the last four days, we’ve seen wet avalanches where the snowpack gets so wet and dense, it comes down the mountainside almost like lava.”’ The article compared the flooding Utah experienced with a past year, 1983 that had an extreme amount of snowfall. It mentions that there was flooding all throughout downtown Salt Lake, but since that year it hasn’t been wet enough and we have been digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a drought. We spent years building up this drought in Utah, so this past season of record snowfall will not be the sole event to bring us out of it.
I learned from this article that there isn’t imminent danger of the Great Salt Lake drying up and harming the population, but we are not out of the woods either.
I do agree that we are probably not in any grave danger with the lake but that we should still try to find ways to fix the impending issue. What I don’t understand is who is using the water from the Great Salt Lake? Isn’t it too salty to do anything with it other then maybe make salt? Maybe im missing something though.
It will be interesting to see over the next couple years what new natural disasters develop from estranged environmental conditions we haven’t really seen before. Hopefully the lake stays safe and this drought cycle simply doesn’t ramp up to compensate for the amount of snow received.