Salt Lake’s shrinking finally letting up

SALT LAKE CITY – Hey, Great Salt Lake: Your shoreline is showing.

All summer and into the fall, warm temperatures kept evaporation humming, drawing down the lake to near-record low levels and exposing more shore than normal.

But the shrinking appears finally to have stopped.

Wallace Gwynn of the Utah Geological Survey said the current lake level – measured at 4,194 feet above sea level, give or take an inch or two – seems to have bottomed out about six feet below normal.

“I don’t think we’re going to go a lot lower than this,” Gwynn said.

The lake hasn’t been this low since the early 1970s. Some speculated it might slip past the record low of 4,191.35 set in 1963. But cooler temperatures this fall are finally bringing the shrinking to a stop.

That’s welcome news to boaters driven away by shallow waters.

“Six years ago, when I arrived as park manager, we had 70 sailboats in the marina,” said Ron Taylor, who runs Antelope Island State Park in the southern part of the lake. “Now we have two.”

The lake has a reputation for cyclical fluctuations, rising and falling at the whims of temperature, rainfall and other factors.

In the 1960s and 1970s, many worried the lake would completely dry up.

In the 1980s, more than $60 million was spent on gigantic pumps, which for two years funneled water into the desert west of the lake after severe floods along the shoreline.

By 2002 and 2003, the lake shrank again to levels not seen in years.

Like many lakes, the Great Salt Lake collects water from mountain rain and snow. But, unlike most, the Great Salt Lake has no drain and relies on evaporation to help regulate its levels.

“It’s pretty predictable,” Taylor said.

Not only was the evaporation spurred on by warmer temperatures during the summer, but much of the runoff found its way into the soil before it ever reached the lake.

When the year started, there wasn’t much moisture in the first two feet of soil in some places around the lake, Gywnn said. That soil acts as a sponge for water that runs on top of it.

“If we’re trying to fill up the first two feet, that takes a lot of water,” Gywnn said.

There’s another factor at play too, said Dan Bedford, an associate geography professor at Weber State University who studies the lake.

A portion of the fresh water that used to flow to the lake is now diverted for human uses.

Scientists roughly estimate that the Great Salt Lake is typically about 5 feet lower than it would be if received all of the naturally flowing water, Bedford said.

With another million or so people expected to arrive along the Wasatch Front in the coming decades, that strain on the lake’s water supply is expected to deepen. That’s not to mention predictions of warmer temperatures and longer droughts for portions of the West, including Utah.

“The trend certainly suggests there’s likely to be less water available for the lake in the future unless we’re careful about it,” Bedford said.

Lower lake levels affect more than boaters and the brine shrimp industry, which scoops the tiny creatures out of the water for sale as fish food and other products.

Exposed shorelines offer easier access for predators such as foxes and coyotes to reach island bird populations, Bedford said. Lake levels also play an important role in the wetlands around the lake that provide habitat for millions of birds each year.