When I first moved to Utah in 2004, I assumed that the Great Salt Lake would be a major source recreation for the locals and tourists… boating, swimming, that sort of thing. But as it turns out, I was wrong. The Great Salt Lake is damn near ignored… and for good reason. The water is, as might be expected, very salty… but it’s also loaded with a great many other minerals, metals and toxic nastiness. Nothing lives in it except for some brine shimp and some bacteria… certainly no fish.Willard Bay to the northeast is a fresh water bay, and receives some use… boating and fishing and the like.
What’s more, it’s extremely shallow… boats would run aground. There are places where a person could virtually walk from one side of the lake to the other.
So apart from some salt operations and a few people hunting down brine shrimp, as far as I can tell, the lake is pretty pointless. This, to me, seems like a waste.
What could be done with the lake to make it useful, and what would be required? I have two ideas, which might or might not be mutually exclusive:
1) turn the shallow, toxic lake into a large, deep inland sea stocked with ocean life
2) Turn it into the major energy source for the United States, and perhaps the western hemisphere
So, to start off with, here’s the Great Salt Lake:
It’s an evaporative lake… meaning water flows in, but does not flow out; it just evaporates away. This is why the water quality is so bad… raivers such as the Bear and the Jordan flow in with little bits of salt and other substances dissolved in, leaving those substances behind when the water evaporates away. Total water volume is about 19 cubic kilometers; surface area is about 4400 square kilometers (which averages out to a depth of 4.3 meters). Elevation above sea level at the surface is about 1283 meters.
It will all have to go.
Coming whenever the hell I feel like it: Part 2
7 Responses to “Terraforming Utah: part 1”
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Build a pipeline from the pacific and then, using atomic powered desalination plants and pumping stations, refill lake Provo (which the great salt lake is simply the dregs of)
http://geology.isu.edu/Digital_Geology_Idaho/Module14/mod14.htm
If you’re feeling especially decadent build a dam at red rock pass and refill Lake Bonneville.
This would require some relocations, but as the cities would be relocated to waterfront properties on what is now desert or federal lands the eminent domain payouts and disruptions would be less extensive than they might seem.
OTOH if the warming trend from 1850-1996 were to resume, the temerature might well climb to that of 14,000 years ago when the area was wet enough to support this as well as lake Lahotan in NV.
A few bits of your idea are in my plan, but the end results are quite different…
Oh my. This sounds interesting.
Have you grown that big black mustache and picked up a monocle yet? Or are you going for the Dr Evil look? Inquiring minds and whatnot!
>Or are you going for the Dr Evil look?
I think Blofeld, what with the cats and all…….
Actually we need to ‘preserve’ part of it.. for posterity… (Why ARE we saving things for someones rear-end anyway?? ;o)
Seriously, (Ok, not quite yet really :o) I’ve never actually asked but are you “from-around-these-parts” Scott? Were you a member of the “Bring-Back-Lake-Bonnaville!” movement when there was all the heavy snows and flooding in the ’80s? Back when the state got the Feds to kick in funds to help build those huge pumps and pipelines to dump ‘excess’ Salt Lake water into Nevada?
Now, maybe actually seriously ;o)
I’d like to see a couple of “shallow” areas domed over and let MORE water evaporate, let some more water in, repeat several times and you have a FANTASTIC passive solar heat collecter and sink system that nets some really decent power as long as you build it right :o)
(Of course you’d want to sell that power to California ’cause no body east of there pays decently for excess power generation :o)
Randy
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