Quote:
Originally Posted by Atlas
No one disputes that the lake level is falling, or that we could do more to stop it. But the second someone says "it's going to be unlivable in 5 years", my eyes roll back into my head.
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Wasn’t going to chime in, but given some of the commentary and my expertise in paleoclimate I couldn’t resist. For those who are interested, below is a summary of the Great Salt Lake and climate over the past 25,000 years. For those not interested and just want to discuss development topics only, keep it moving to the next posts.
The lake level has fluctuated since the last glacial maximum around 22,000 years ago. Back then climate was much cooler, so there was less evaporation and lake levels reached a maximum a few thousand years after the glacial maximum as ice and snow melted and drained into the lake. You can see the ancient lake Bonneville shorelines where the lake used to rise to. Then the lake levels declined until about the younger dryas about 11,500 years ago. Since then during the Holocene Lake levels have fluctuated by about plus or minus 50 feet or so, but there has been no trend towards a deeper or shallower Lake levels with a few wet and dry exceptions like the Medieval Climate Anomaly. More on that later. Currently we are dealing with anthropogenic climate change, which has accelerated warming and caused increased evaporation of lakes like the Salt Lake. Over the past 100 years we had some low stands in the 60s, a high stand in the 80s and now another low stand. So what’s different now compared to the last 22,000 years? This could be the first time in the past 22,000 years and beyond that, that the lake may dry up completely.
Now I can list all the cascading environmental effects the lake drying up will have from migratory birds that eat the lakes brine shrimp that need a certain salinity level to exist, to the lake effect snow that helps fuel our ski industry. This year is wet. And as Reeder pointed out there were a few wet years since 2000. But the other 15 of the 20 years were dry and with higher temperatures due to anthropogenic climate change evaporation rates are higher then they’ve ever been. Couple that with increasing water usage and bad water practices and here we are.
If you look at dendrochronology, the study of tree rings we can see in older trees wet and dry years. Old trees have rings that go back a couple thousand years. We are fortunate to have some real old bristlecones in our backyard along the Utah Nevada border to pull some data points from. These proxy data show that the last 20 years since 2000, has been the worst drought since the medieval climate anomaly about 1400 years ago. Climate does naturally vary. There are wet and dry years, but this drought has been exacerbated by higher temperatures then we’ve experienced since wellbefore the Quaternary Period which has encompassed the last 2.6 million years. We should take the lake drying up seriously. Should we arm wave? No. There are solutions I believe in better using and allocating our water. Will the lake dry up in 5 years? Maybe not, we could string together a few wet years, maybe even a wet decade. But did anyone notice that the really wet winter a few years ago only marginally raised lake levels but not nearly enough? Higher temperatures and evaporation in addition to our water usage are a forces to be reckoned with. We have one thing in our power as a state of Utah. To better allocate our water and send more water to the GSL.
Now I’ll wait for someone to complain that this is a development forum and this information is not pertinent, but I did warn those that are annoyed by this rhetoric to not read beyond the first paragraph. Gotta love Science, especially Science that hasn’t been disproven by the scientific method - the Science I speak of above
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