Millions of eared grebes visit Great Salt Lake to rest and refuel en route to their winter homes on the Pacific Coast each fall, along with 250 other bird species throughout the year. That’s about 10 million individual birds whose survival depends on the massive saline lake and its bounty of micro-organisms and tiny flies, and shrimp.

Each visiting grebe eats between 25,000 and 30,000 brine shrimp a day, according to John Luft, who runs the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources’ Great Salt Lake Ecosystem Program.

“We’ve had as many as 5 million grebes on the lake in the fall, and they stay here September to December,” Luft told University of Utah officials last week during an airboat tour of Farmington Bay. You do the math to figure out how many shrimp these birds eat. It’s in the trillions.

That was one of the many curious facts about Utah’s vibrant, yet imperiled inland sea given to U administrators, including President Taylor Randall, on the tour. Led by Utah’s Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed, the trip was organized to update U leaders on the status of the lake and the progress of the Great Salt Lake Strike Team, a partnership between academic researchers and state officials investigating ways to reverse the lake’s alarming decline.

Earlier this year, the team presented a briefing and key recommendations to the Utah Legislature, identifying lake elevations needed to ensure the lake’s ecological health, 4,198 to 4,205 feet above sea level, and calling for changes to Utah water law to allow water conserved upstream to reach the lake via the Bear, Weber and Jordan rivers.

Universities’ role in saving the lake

“Higher education has an absolute role to play in setting the academic baseline knowledge as well as helping solve some of these wicked societal problems,” said Steed, who heads Utah State University’s Janet Quinney Lawson Institute for Land, Water & Air. “This is as much a business problem as an agriculture problem, a marketing problem as it is anything else.”

On the tour, U officials heard from Luft, Ben Stireman of the Division of Forestry, Fire and State Lands, and other key officials with the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the state agency responsible for managing the 1,500-square-mile lake. About half the lakebed is currently dry, leaving pockets of loose sediments serving as sources of potentially hazardous dust blowing into Salt Lake and Davis County cities.

Two decades of drought and a century of upstream diversions have depleted the lake, lowering its level to a point that scientists believe will severely damage the ecosystems and industries that depend on it. Currently, 6 feet below what is considered its optimal zone, damage is already occurring. Three years ago, state officials began prioritizing the lake’s recovery, with large investments in conservation and water rights acquisitions.

The strike team came together at Randall’s urging soon after he was named U president in 2022. The goal was to join experts from Utah’s two public research universities with officials from key state agencies to investigate the lake’s challenges and identify the best solutions.

“It’s been just an incredible asset to the state, because there’s nothing better than the research universities combined with the state agencies when it comes to applied science and doing things,” said Natalie Gochnour, director of the U’s Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute, which is providing staff support for strike team activities and publications.

The two schools have complemented one another for an effective partnership, she said.

“Utah State is the land-grant university; they have significant hydrological and agricultural expertise. Since approximately 70% of the water use in this state is agriculture, you have to have agricultural experts at the table,” she said. “At the U, we have expertise in climate and hydrology, as well, and we have expertise in dust.”

Meanwhile, Utah water officials have closely monitored stream flow and other hydrological data for more than a century, leaving an unparalleled historic record among Western states.

“We have such an extensive historical record on the lake,” Gochnour said. “It makes doing this science so much easier.”

U faculty active on the strike team are hydrologist Paul Brooks; forest biologist Bill Anderegg; geologist Bill Johnson; and atmospheric scientists John Lin and Courtenay Strong. Anderegg and Lin are founding directors of the U’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science & Policy. USU members include Steed, David Tarboton, Joanna Endter-Wada, Sarah Null, Bethany Nielson and Matt Yost.

Why water conservation isn’t enough

There is widespread agreement that aggressive water conservation is needed, but saving water presents a different set of challenges.

“Here’s the rub,” Gochnour said. “It’s really complicated because you can conserve water upstream, but there is no guarantee that it gets to the lake.”

Under Utah’s historic water laws, water not used by a priority water right holder is available to a junior water right holder. Water reaching the lake was considered wasted since it was never a place to catch fish or store water for human use. That paradigm is now changing thanks to new interpretations that credit the lake as a “beneficial use” of water since its survival bolsters extractive industries, recreation, ecosystems and public health.

“So farmers can let their water go by without risk of losing that right,” Gochnour said. “That wasn’t the case before.”

On last week’s tour, participants learned that salinity levels on the lake vary widely depending on location, from saturation levels of 27% in the North Arm, which is cut off from the rest of the lake by a railroad causeway, to just 1% in Bear River Bay where the lake’s largest tributary enters. Farmington Bay is 3 to 5% and 11% in the open parts of the South Arm. By comparison, the ocean is about 3.5% salt on average.

A resilient ecosystem at risk

Increased lake salinity and water temperatures resulting from further lake level declines could have serious consequences on the plants and tiny critters that form the basis of the food chain.

One such native plant is the salt-tolerant pickleweed, belonging to the genus Salicornia and a family that includes beets and chard. The seeds are located inside the succulent stems, which burst in the winter when they freeze, releasing the seeds. The result is an oil-rich food source for snowy plover, horned lark and other birds that breed in Utah.

But pickleweed has been crowded out by invasive phragmites, a water-hogging reed that is the target of the state’s eradication campaign.

Much is at stake, not just for Utahns, but for the entire hemisphere. if the lake fails, extractive industries would fold, clouds of hazardous dust would be unleashed and a vital ecosystem would collapse.

“There are a lot of Utahns who perceive the lake as just a stinky body of water, and buggy,” Steed said. “We have verified that it is buggy and stinky. However, when you look at the values that come from the Great Salt Lake, I think we undervalue it greatly.”

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Read more about the Great Salt Lake Strike Team and U’s research about the lake.

• Great Salt Lake is rebounding but dust monitoring needs improvement
• Just how dangerous is Great Salt Lake dust? New research looks for clues
• A roadmap for rescuing the Great Salt Lake
• From mountains to Great Salt Lake: The secrets of snowmelt
• Airborne dust from Great Salt Lake playa has bigger impact on communities of color

• Brian Maffly Science writer, University of Utah Communications
  801-573-2382 brian.maffly@utah.edu