Scientists found that Great Salt Lake’s chemistry and water balance were stable for thousands of years, until human settlement. Irrigation and farming in the 1800s and a railroad causeway in 1959 created dramatic, lasting changes. The lake now behaves in ways unseen for at least 2,000 years.
I lived on Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake for two summers doing field research. It was an amazing place, simultaneously ’dead’ and also vibrantly and abundantly alive.
If humans were wiser about managing natural resources, this paper summarizes just how small human interventions can either improve biological systems or ruin them with simple changes.
The diversity of migratory birds that pause there along the way is stunning. On some sunrise mornings, the sky in the direction of Bear River Bay would be blackened by the huge flocks that stopped there on the way elsewhere.
Cool paper.
