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July 29, 2025
Retreating water ranges are exposing stretches of cracked, arsenic-laden lakebed in Utah. Future mud storms will carry an additional hazard.
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Individuals wade within the waters of the Nice Salt Lake at Antelope Island in August 2021.
(Justin Sullivan / Getty)
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Utah is the third-driest state in the USA. From the parched Colorado Plateau to the even drier Nice Basin, it’s virtually all desert.
This piece was initially written for Harvard Writing for the Local weather—a contest that encourages college students to advocate for environmental motion by writing—the place it received first place for nonfiction.
In highschool, I rowed with Utah’s solely membership crew staff. Every spring, we drove our boats to the Nice Salt Lake—the one place for miles with sufficient water to row on. The lake’s salty water stank of sulfur, which made all the pieces it touched stink, too. Hundreds of brine flies swarmed our docks. They’d carpet my arms so thickly that once I seemed down, I’d see extra flies than flesh.
However away from shore, I might spot magnificence throughout. The water would stretch to date in each path that I couldn’t see the land past. Until the wind picked up, the lake lay flat, gleaming, and blue. Mountains pierced its floor and cloned themselves within the ripples under. They seemed like spinning tops—stretching from peaks to flared bases, then winnowing again to sharp factors.
I seen with awe how the lake teemed with life. I’d look down, and what I believed have been floating flakes of sediment would start to swim. They have been brine shrimp: crustaceans that carry the Nice Salt Lake’s ecosystem on their centimeter-long backs. Waterfowl would fill the sky, diving to dip their beaks and spindly legs into my wake.
The 12 months I left for school, one in every of my sisters joined the crew staff. I hoped we might bond over rowing on the lake. However that November, a former teammate referred to as me. She mentioned our staff wasn’t rowing on the Nice Salt Lake that subsequent 12 months; that they could by no means row on it once more. Utah was in a water scarcity, and the lake had shriveled to its lowest ranges on report.
The shoreline had receded a lot that our docks grew to become unusable. Most boats had been hauled out of the water because it crept down their bows. The boats that remained lay beached in a dry marina—a ghost city the place, simply months earlier than, I’d rowed each afternoon.
Present Difficulty
The Nice Salt Lake sits 20 miles northwest of my home in Salt Lake Metropolis. You see it everytime you take a look at the horizon: a streak of silver separating land and sky.
From its perch, the Nice Salt Lake sustains all of northern Utah. Moisture evaporates from the lake and falls within the close by mountains (principally as snow, giving Utah fabulous snowboarding). Come spring, this water trickles by Utah’s valleys and returns to the lake. On its method, it hydrates the vegetation, animals, and folks alongside the close by Wasatch Entrance, residence to Salt Lake Metropolis.
After I first visited the Nice Salt Lake on a fifth-grade area journey, it lined 1,700 sq. miles. Although I didn’t comprehend it but, this was half of its dimension 30 years earlier than, when my mother was a fifth-grader. Within the Eighties, Nice Salt Lake unfold over 3,300 sq. miles—bigger than Rhode Island and Delaware mixed.
Now, my youngest sisters are in fifth grade. And once more, the lake has halved, dropping to 888 sq. miles in 2022. With out significant change, the Nice Salt Lake will vanish inside my lifetime.
The Nice Salt Lake at its highest recorded ranges in 1985 (left) vs. its lowest recorded ranges in 2022 (proper).(NASA)
This is able to spell disaster for Utah. The New York Instances says the Nice Salt Lake’s disappearance would represent an “environmental nuclear bomb.” Water provides would dwindle, and ecosystems would perish: from the brine shrimp within the lake to the over 10 million migratory birds that refuel in its marshes annually. Utah’s inhabitants might vanish with them.
When Utah industrialized, mines started dumping waste into the lake, polluting it with heavy metals like arsenic. As a terminal lake, the Nice Salt Lake has inlets however no shops apart from evaporation. All of the metals which have ever been poured into the Nice Salt Lake have accrued in its lakebed over time, with no method out.
Now, retreating water ranges are exposing stretches of cracked, arsenic-laden lakebed. Windstorms have begun to blow throughout the lakebed, selecting up clouds of toxic mud. They carry it into the Wasatch Entrance, which homes 2.8 million of Utah’s 3.4 million residents.
Even inhaling atypical mud will be devastating to well being. Arsenic-laced mud storms from the Nice Salt Lake’s dried lakebed carry an additional hazard. When these storms arrive, the air will flip poisonous. Tens of millions of Utahns alongside the Wasatch Entrance—together with my complete household—will breathe poison.
This mud received’t kill you in a single day, however the EPA hyperlinks it to “bronchial asthma, coronary heart assaults, and untimely demise.” Related disasters have occurred to different lakes, and close by cities haven’t fared effectively. After Owens Lake, a saline lake in California, dried up and poisonous mud storms began, cities alongside its coast emptied. The arid lakebed stuffed the encompassing air with PM10—tiny particles which have critical well being results if inhaled. Owens Lake grew to become the nation’s largest single PM10 supply, spreading air pollution throughout the West. The Nice Salt Lake is 15 occasions bigger than Owens Lake ever was. Its collapse could be much more catastrophic.
It terrifies me, considering of what would occur to my group if the Nice Salt Lake vanished. My little siblings all have extreme bronchial asthma, and two stay with simply 60 % of regular lung capability.
When my brother visited the Nice Salt Lake on his personal fifth-grade area journey, his rowdy class kicked up mud on the lakeshore, which plunged him right into a extreme bronchial asthma assault. Happily, he had his inhaler prepared. However what would occur to my siblings if these mud storms invade Salt Lake Metropolis? And the air exterior his home? May he survive in a spot the place he might barely breathe?
If the lake absolutely dries up, I do know my household has the means to depart Utah, and we’ll.
That is what occurred to the cities round Owens Lake. Those that might afford it fled. The much less lucky stayed and handled the implications.
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The subsequent few years will decide the Nice Salt Lake’s destiny. Utah faces two choices. We will reply with apathy and watch because the lake disappears, together with lots of Utah’s residents. Or we are able to get up to the hazard we’re in. Enact substantive laws, supply water conservation incentives, and applicable cash to save lots of the lake.
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Saving the Nice Salt Lake received’t be straightforward. The College of Utah estimates that 33 % extra water should circulation into the lake annually for it to achieve wholesome water ranges by the 2050s. This implies Utahns must make sacrifices. We should curb municipal water use—by eliminating water-intensive lawns, for instance.
Utah agriculture, the most important shopper of water from the lake, should additionally cut back its water consumption. It doubtless received’t do that by itself, so Utah’s legislature should take motion. Utah’s authorities should tighten water use laws round thirsty crops like alfalfa, and make investments state funds to lease water rights again from agricultural teams so extra water can circulation to the lake.
These actions will likely be politically charged and economically pricey within the quick time period. However they are going to be sure that Utah, its folks, and its industries final far into the long run.
I fear that my siblings might by no means know the Utah I do know. My littlest sisters are 10 years youthful than me, and quite a bit can change in a decade. Will they ever ski by lake-effect snow, or discover themselves enveloped within the sensible sunsets you solely see rowing on the Nice Salt Lake?
I pray they are going to. However greater than that, I rely on myself and different Utahns to take motion.
Adelaide Parker
Adelaide Parker is a 2025 Puffin scholar writing fellow specializing in schooling for The Nation. She is a author and scholar at Harvard School from Salt Lake Metropolis, Utah, majoring in social research and philosophy. She works as a co-op for The Boston Globe.
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