So throughout the summer I
was like so many others, overwhelmed with dire news
About wars, droughts, floods and other disasters
droughts, wildfires and heatwaves.
Yet the ones that stuck out to me the most were these:
disappearing lakes and rivers.
To me there's nothing as powerful as these outlandish images
of a dystopian dry world exhibiting remnants of the past.
Sunk Nazi ships were uncovered still loaded with explosives.
An ancient site called the “Spanish Stonehenge” was revealed
showing a super old formation of megalithic stones.
Or these long forgotten Buddha statues on the Yangtze River.
That completely struck my mind!
But then there's this-
and I must say, this gives me the creeps:
The Great Salt Lake, one of America's largest lakes, is disappearing,
and with it an entire ecosystem of hundreds of bird species
and one of the world's finest skiing areas.
But the real jitters come from what's beneath.
Covered by a shallow layer of water lies a dirty secret that once uncovered
will threaten the lives of millions of people,
in and around the shiny metropolis of Salt Lake City.
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And now back to the question, where did all those lakes go?
My journey starts here:
on my desk in Vienna,
diving through the vast worlds of online maps.
I stumbled across these time lapses on Google Earth:
all over a planet from Iran to Bolivia.
There are massive lakes that lost vast amounts of their surface area during recent years.
In disbelief of what I saw, I looked deeper into this.
Why are there entire lakes simply drying up and why so many of them?
I realized that even my home country, Austria, a land known to be blessed
with bountiful resources of fresh water, wasn't spared:
on the country's eastern edge, only an hour's drive away from Vienna,
one of its largest lakes, seemed to be drying up as well.
The situation is so bad that ideas are popping up
with the plan to redirect the Danube River to refill the lake.
I mean ... What could go wrong? Right.
A lake of this size, that close to where I live.
I had to go and take a look for myself.
In fact, there was no way of overlooking the lack of water.
When I arrived it had been raining for four days in a row and still everywhere you look,
you would see an area once covered with water, now turned into dry mud or dust.
This was all water.
And now there is no lake left around here.
Water is gone.
It turns out that this phenomenon is not unique.
All those lakes have one thing in common.
They're terminal. Their water has no outflow.
They're independent bodies of water,
that equilibriate through precipitation and evaporation.
Those lakes are usually quite shallow and have a tendency to dry up easily.
Lake Neusiedl, for example, dried up hundreds of times throughout its history.
Last time in 1870.
And back then, local farmers took advantage of the situation
and started growing their crops across the lake on this extremely fertile soil.
But! And this is a huge but ... sounds weird. Anyway.
Some of these lakes usually don't dry up and they shouldn't.
For reasons you might not expect.
At least I didn't.
At the eastern end of a seemingly endless, pale brown desert
of Nevada and Utah, lies the Great Salt Lake.
On its southern tip, one of America's fastest growing urban areas,
home to 2.5 million people, with Salt Lake City as its center.
Water levels have dropped over six meters since 1985.
Last summer, the water level in Great Salt Lake reached its lowest
point on record, a drop that has exposed over 2000 kilometers
of lake bed, an area almost as large as the entire country of Luxembourg.
A half the state of Rhode Island.
Apart from the huge environmental consequences of this drought
the worst of the possible threats lies buried below the surface.
See the lake's soil contains a large variety of hazardous
heavy metals and other materials like antimony, copper, but predominantly:
arsenic.
Byproducts and discharge, mainly stemming from mining activities in the region.
Most of the exposed soil is still protected by a hard crust,
but with wind eroding the crust over time
those harmful materials become airborne.
These clouds of dust can contaminate entire regions
and make it difficult for local people to breathe.
Eventually leading
to possible different types of cancer or cardiovascular diseases.
Okay. Okay. Okay. I got it. I get it.
One could argue that this is just another doomsday
scenario painted on the wall by pessimistic environmentalists.
But in this case, it's really important to note that the worst-case scenario
for the Great Salt Lake, is neither abstract nor hypothetical.
Actually, there's a history textbook case that can give you a brief look into what
the region's future could look like.
Nearly 100 kilometers south,
between Mt. Whitney and the Death Valley lies Owens Lake.
In the early 1900s, Los Angeles, growing very fast and basically
running out of water, made a very clever move.
Sort of.
It bought the land along each side of the Owens River
and then built an aqueduct, diverting the river's water to its own use.
The lake dried up. But not only that.
It became the worst source of dust pollution in the USA, in the 20th century.
Since then, the city of Los Angeles has spent 2.5 billion USD trying
to keep the wind from blowing off the dust with basically two different strategies:
One was covering the lakebed with gravel, the other one was sprinkling the lake
with just enough water to hold the dust in place.
Keeler, once a boom town at the shores, had to be evacuated
and became the ghost town that it is today.
And we're talking about a lake, that's only a fraction of the size of the Great Salt Lake.
In theory, fix a simple that more water from the melting snowpacks
reached the lake by sending less towards homes, businesses and farms.
The megacity itself, the agriculture around it
and ultimately the lake are only possible because of a minor hydrological miracle:
Just east of Salt Lake City lies the Wasatch Mountain Range, the packs of
snow that fall here during the winter melt westwards feed three rivers, which
ultimately provide water for the area before flowing into the Great Salt Lake.
This hydrological system existed in a delicate balance with evaporation
in the summer, snow falls in the winter, and snow melting in spring time.
But not anymore.
The average temperatures in the mountains have been rising throughout the last decades,
causing more snow to transform into water vapor
before even getting the chance to run into the rivers in a liquid form.
Apart from that, the tremendous pace of population growth
and with it the extensive farming around the area, suck immense quantities of water.
So the exploding demand for water
in the region can only be covered by diverting
even more from the rivers before it reaches the lake.
And to make things worse, more heat, obviously means more demand for water,
for lawns and crops, even further shrinking the water levels.
A shrinking lake also means less snow.
Why? Well,
the Wasatch Mountains greatly benefit from the so-called lake effect snow:
When really cold, below freezing air
passes over the lake's warmer waters, it evaporates and warm the air.
Then the moist air moves to the mountains and after cooling,
the air dumps its moisture on the ground for massive snow packs.
“More and more people realize that the lake we're connected to the lake,
whether we want to be or not, it protects our air quality.”
And yes, the city is already
trying to conserve water, but there's simply not enough to support
consumption levels by its current population.
And the city is expected to grow almost 50% more by 2060.
Local governments have not yet addressed the main issue
and the most powerful tool to mitigate the crisis: the depiction of real costs.
In other words: higher water prices.
Salt Lake City's population boom comes down to its attractiveness
via high standards of living with low costs predominately for water.
Out of all the US states, Utah has among the lowest per gallon water rates.
This makes absolutely no sense.
It also consumes more water for residential use than other desert cities.
Homes around Salt Lake City boast lush forest-green lawns
despite the drought.
Only by reflecting the true costs of a potential future environmental disaster at
Great Salt Lake, people, it seems, are willing to act accordingly.
“You can't have growth and then continue to live the way with the green lawns
and everything else and continue to have agriculture
and continue to have a healthy environment.”
So as with so many environmental threats, we can narrow down to the point
that we simply live in a system where economic
prosperity is paid by future environmental depletion.
We have the choice today: either future generations will pay the price
for our lavish lives with fresh green lawns
and water intense farms in the middle of the desert.
Or we choose to scale it down now and ensure sustainable lives for millions
while protecting natural miracles such as the Great Salt Lake.
What about Lake Neusiedl you migth ask?
Well, that's a topic for a different video, I might say.
Meanwhile, please stay tuned like and subscribe and do leave a comment below.
See you next time.