So, the western drought is turning the Great Salt Lake into a Great Salt Flat:

One of the suggestions made right at the end of the news piece is piping in ocean water.

Huh.

HUH.

Now, I wonder where I might have heard *that* idea before?

Oh, right: here.

Terraforming Utah: part 1

Terraforming Utah: part 2

My idea was to drain the lake, scoop out the muck, transport said muck out west a bit and build hills out of it, build pipelines from the sea to the lake. By scooping the bottom out ten, twenty, a  hundred feet and filling with ocean water, you can stock the lake with ocean life and turn it into a breeding ground for endangered fish, and an inland sea for fishing.

Sure, it’s an engineering challenge of some serious difficulty. But… step one seems to be well underway, whether we like it or not. What’s being left is a dry lake bed filled with salt and dust and arsenic; this stuff blowing around will make the atmosphere kinda horrible. So Something Must Be Done anyway. Why not go all the way?

And the lessons learned and industry spurred by the Pacific-to-Utah pipeline will come in handy when we built the Mississippi River-to-dry-western-states pipelines. Put the mouths of the pipes right at flood stage for the Mississippi, and draw out those irritating flood water out west where they can do some good filling rives and lakes and irrigating fields and putting out fires.