*The Great Salt Lake sits in northern Utah and is the remnant of Lake Bonneville, a massive prehistoric lake that once covered much of the Great Basin.
*It is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and one of the saltiest inland water bodies on Earth. If you were to rank the saltiest bodies of water on Earth, the Great Salt Lake would fall roughly between 9th and 12th, depending on which arm of the lake you measure.
*The Bear, Weber and Jordan rivers flow into the Great Salt Lake. The lake has no outlets.
*Its historic healthy elevation is about 4,200 feet above sea level. As of April 2026, the elevation was about 4,192 feet, just above the crisis lows of 2021–2022 (around 4,188 feet).
*The highest the lake has been in the last 100 years is 4,211.6 feet above sea level, reached on June 3, 1986. At that time, the lake covered about 2,300 square miles (nearly 2.5× its 2022 low). The high resulted from a multi‑year precipitation surge combined with limited evaporation. Water poured in from the Wasatch Mountains and especially from the mountains feeding the three major rivers. The lake rose high enough to damage and threaten infrastructure. It did not flood homes in the Salt Lake Valley, but it did flood the valley’s transportation and industrial perimeter. In some places, floodwaters were on both sides of I‑80 (not I‑15). The rise was so extreme that Utah built the West Desert Pumping Project to prevent flooding of highways, rail lines, and other critical infrastructure. The pumping station still exists but has not been used in decades.
*The 1986 flooding is often confused with the 1983 flooding. The famous images of water running down State Street are from the 1983 flood, caused by rapid mountain runoff.
*It would take tens of millions of acre‑feet of water—not just a couple of good winters—to restore the lake to its historic high.
No comments:
Post a Comment