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Concept
Great Salt Lake
Summary
The Great Salt Lake (Shoshone: Ti'tsa-pa “Bad Water”) is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world. It lies in the northern part of the U.S. state of Utah and has a substantial impact upon the local climate, particularly through lake-effect snow. It is a remnant of Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric body of water that covered much of western Utah.
The area of the lake can fluctuate substantially due to its low average depth of . In the 1980s, it reached a historic high of , and the West Desert Pumping Project was established to mitigate flooding by pumping water from the lake into the nearby desert. In 2021, after years of sustained drought and increased water diversion upstream of the lake, it fell to its lowest recorded area at , falling below the previous low set in 1963. Continued shrinkage could turn the lake into a bowl of toxic dust, poisoning the air around Salt Lake City.
The lake's three major tributaries, the Jordan, Weber, and Bear rivers together deposit around 1.1 million tons of minerals in the lake per year. Since the lake has no outlet besides evaporation, these minerals accumulate and give the lake high salinity (far saltier than seawater) and density. This density causes swimming in the lake to feel similar to floating.
The lake has been called "America's Dead Sea" and provides a habitat for millions of native birds, brine shrimp, shorebirds, and waterfowl, including the largest staging population of Wilson's phalarope in the world.
The Great Salt Lake is a remnant of a much larger prehistoric lake called Lake Bonneville. At its greatest extent, Lake Bonneville spanned , nearly as large as present-day Lake Michigan, and roughly ten times the area of the Great Salt Lake today. Bonneville reached at its deepest point and covered much of present-day Utah and small portions of Idaho and Nevada during the ice ages of the Pleistocene Epoch.
Lake Bonneville existed until about 16,800 years ago, when a large portion of the lake was released through the Red Rock Pass in Idaho, resulting in cataclysmic floods.
Official source
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