The Utah nonprofit at the forefront of preserving Utah’s Great Salt Lake honored University of Utah hydrologist Bill Johnson as the 2026 Friend of the Lake for his decades of research tracking the movement of hazardous elements and pathogens into the lake.
More recently, a team of U geoscientists led by Johnson, a professor in the Department of Geology & Geophysics, where he has taught since 1995, documented the presence of freshwater aquifers under one of Earth’s saltiest places.
Johnson received the award on May 8 at the FRIENDS of Great Salt Lake’s biennial Issues Forum in Salt Lake City.
“If Great Salt Lake had a scientific guardian angel, it would no doubt be Bill Johnson—though he’d probably prefer the title ‘contaminant transport specialist,’” the group said in a post about the accolade it has issued every other year since 2002.
The inaugural Friend of the Lake award went to another U faculty member, geography professor Donald Currey, who documented the geomorphology of the ancient Lake Bonneville, Great Salt Lake’s vast freshwater predecessor.
Johnson has long studied how mercury and selenium cycle through the lake’s saline waters, sediments and the organisms inhabiting them. His most noteworthy achievement concerning the lake zeroed in on the U.S. Magnesium Superfund site on the southwest shore. Johnson provided crucial guidance for cleanup efforts.
Johnson’s first task was to sort through a deluge of documents describing the full extent of the contamination problem.
“He has been at it ever since,” FRIENDS said. “He quickly discovered that there was a highly-contaminated groundwater mound beneath the company’s wastewater ponds on the lakebed—prompting [Utah Department of Environmental Quality] to require construction of a barrier wall to stop the contamination from reaching the open waters of the lake.”
The group credited Johnson for keeping tabs on serious problems at U.S. Magnesium, including wastewater ponds that bubbled like cauldrons because of their elevated acidity and chlorine emissions so high that he was advised to remove his contact lenses before approaching the facility.
“His risk assessments for the site have demonstrated that human carcinogenic risk and risks to birds, mammals, and benthic invertebrates at the site have drastically exceeded regulatory benchmarks—findings that have kept regulators and polluters alike on notice,” FRIENDS said. “In short, Bill Johnson has spent 30 years making sure that what goes into Great Salt Lake—and what threatens to—doesn’t go unnoticed.”