What's happening to the Great Salt Lake?

MAN's series on preserving Spiral Jetty
Part One: The future of Spiral Jetty.
Part Two: What's happening to the Great Salt Lake?
Part Three: Spiral Jetty, the Great Salt Lake and Dia
Part Four: Dia's 'buffer' approach to preserving Spiral Jetty
Part Five: The next step at GSL: Coalition-building, funding
Postscript: Spiral Jetty: Is federal protection a useful option?

The Great Salt Lake is changing quickly. It is not clear why.

Lake levels have plummeted to the lowest levels in over 40 years. Mercury levels are rising and rising fast. The problem has emerged so quickly and unexpectedly that the Great Salt Lake now has one of the highest concentrations of mercury of any body of water in the United States. And this summer extractive industries filed new applications in an effort to create immense new evaporation ponds just west of Spiral Jetty. The ponds would be so enormous that they'd nearly double the size of existing GSL evaporation pools. If they are approved, the size of the new evaporation facilities would be bigger than the footprint of Salt Lake City.

[The image above shows evaporation ponds in Bear River Bay to the east of Spiral Jetty, which is off this image to the left, west of the Promontory Mountains. The green patches on the right of this Google Satellite picture are Ogden exurbs.]

"When you manage a hemispherically important ecosystem with one eye covered something has to give," says Lynn de Freitas, the executive director of Friends of Great Salt Lake, the environmental group that monitors the lake. "It's not just Spiral Jetty that's at risk. Currently, economics is the bottom line for all management decisions about Great Salt Lake. Development on and around the lake, diverting water for the growing population, and failing to fund research to determine why Great Salt Lake has the highest mercury levels ever recorded in the nation puts the entire ecosystem at risk of death by a thousand cuts."

Each of these developments has potential ramifications for Spiral Jetty.

Lake level
Last week the Great Salt Lake's elevation was 4,194 feet, a 40-year low. That has puzzled scientists: The winter of 2007-08 was a wet one in Utah. Lake levels should be higher. Instead, they're low and falling, effectively sped up because of the shallowness of the lake. It's not clear if the changes in lake level are part of a natural cycle -- they seem too extreme and relatively sudden for that -- or if they stem from increases in population around the lake.

Robert Smithson, the artist who created Spiral Jetty, expected that the Jetty would sometimes be visible and that it would often be underwater. If lake levels continue to recede because of human intervention -- and not just because of global climate change -- obviously the work will be substantially less likely to be underwater.

Mercury level
Three years ago U.S. Geological Survey scientists conducted routine tests around the Great Salt Lake and found something that stunned them: The lake's mercury levels were alarmingly high. Those 2005 tests found that the most poisonous form of mercury, methylmercury, exceeded 25 nanograms per liter of GSL water. How high is that? When the same form of mercury was found in the Florida Everglades at just one nanogram per liter, governments posted fish consumption warnings.

The state of Utah, caught off-guard, responded to the news by warning residents not to eat certain kinds of ducks. Multiple federal agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are now using federal funding to study the issue in an effort to find out what's going on.
 
There are three ways that increased mercury levels could affect the Jetty. First, it's possible that high mercury levels could effect brine shrimp, birds, or the red algae that gives the Jetty a blood-like hue. That hue was important to Smithson, who spoke and wrote frequently about the importance of the red algae to the Jetty. (See Smithson talking with Kenneth Baker in an interview first published in Dia's 2005 Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty: True Fictions, False Realities, and in his application letter for the Jetty's land lease. Also, Suzaan Boettger explains Smithson's interest in the red algae in her book Earthworks.)

Second, it's not clear what affect mercury could have on the salts on the earthwork itself. Finally, It is unclear if high mercury levels in the Great Salt Lake could eventually impact human visitation to the Jetty (or to other parts of the GSL).

Evaporation ponds
In 2007 the Great Salt Lake Minerals Corporation filed to install 33,000 acres of new evaporation ponds in the Great Salt Lake. Most of them, 22,700 acres would be installed just west of the Jetty. The rest would be on the other side of the Promontory Mountains, in the Bear River Bay. [The image at right is taken from GSLM's application. The black area marks the proposed new evaporation ponds in the Jetty's neighborhood. I added the red dot to mark the Jetty.]

It's not certain that the ponds would be visible from the Jetty or Rozel Point. They are further west of the Jetty than the Promontory Mountains are east. Regardless, the ponds would certainly introduce a dramatic change into the ecology of the northern sections of the lake. Groups such as the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network and FOGSL have expressed concern about the new pools.

As with the proposed oil drilling in the Great Salt Lake, the ponds must go through what is effectively a permitting process. Next month the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will release a draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) regarding the Great Salt Lake Mineral Corp.'s plan. The EPA review will examine a range of environmental factors, including "wildlife habitat, water quality, Great Salt Lake water elevations, wetlands, hydrology, cultural resources, transportation, endangered species and industry." The DEIS is expected to be released in October, and EPA has scheduled three public comment meetings in Utah in November.

While these are the three most apparent, immediate threats to the ecology of the Jetty's neighborhood (and possibly to the Jetty itself), no one I've spoken to in the last three weeks expects these to remain the only threats.

"[The Jetty's] part of the lake is being looked at for obvious reasons for oil and gas, but also for its high concentration of salts and the easy evaporation of those resources," FOGSL's de Freitas says, adding that the state of Utah tends to approve such use. "Remember, the state motto for Utah is, 'Industry.' That's the whole thing."

Tomorrow: Where does Dia stand on these issues?