Great Salt Lake: To Be or Not To Be?

摘要

THE GREAT SALT LAKE (GSL), the vast body of water that stretches north and west of the capitol city of Utah, has significant economic, ecological, and cultural importance to the region and beyond. However, it faces an array of stresses common to saline lakes throughout the world that challenge its ability to fulfill its uses and values, and threaten its very existence. Fortunately, awareness of the lake's importance and susceptibility is increasing, and collaborative efforts are underway to protect the lake into the future. The GSL is one of the last, best open spaces proximate to the rapidly growing urban corridor where the majority of Utahns live. A place where you can witness an impossibly long vista of the Basin and Range, commiserate with birds on layover from all reaches of the hemisphere, and experience a million dollar sunset from a secluded shoreline. The strangeness of the place draws one to its unique intrigues: a lunar landscape with reddish-purple water and white-capped domes in the North Arm, open waters with just the right salinity to support a thriving brine shrimp fishery in the South Arm, and freshwater wetlands teeming with waterfowl along its eastern shores. The intrepid visitor who ventures into the water will float weightlessly on the effervescent hypersalinity. A salinity driven density stratification results in portions of the lake being underlain by a monimolimnetic deep brine layer. There are several engineering marvels, including the Lucin Cutoff (a 102- mile railroad causeway), land-fill causeways that subdivide the lake into four distinct-yetconnected entities, the West Desert Pumping Project (which briefly created a second salt lake in the 1980s), and the Behrens Trench, a 21-mile underwater canal that ingeniously uses density gradients to convey water to evaporative ponds.