You're forgetting Lake Texcoco in México, pretty much the same but even more curious cuz an entire city was built on top of it, and would face water problems, ironically
As a native Utahn, I thank you for making this. This environmental disaster in the making is quite possibly the worst one the west has seen yet, but nobody seems to be taking notice. And to those who say this "isn't that bad" I urge you to research what the lake does for Utah, and why the dust storms that are appearing are beginning to get people sick.
Love that diverse content you've been creating, consider doing expansion maps of some animal species including extinct ones. A good idea for a starter ; invasive Lionfish
Especially prehistoric species for which we have a strong fossil or archeological record. Mammoths, sabre-tooth cats, etc. Some that made it into the modern era including aurochs. Would it be possible to source enough historical data for the famous eradication of wolves in Britain? It's, like, part of their national myth. It's noted in I-don't-know-how-many timelines of British history.
@Benn M the problem is much of our fossil record is like at most a couple hundred examples of a species spread over a million years, it's hard to make an animation of that, simply put the conditions required to make a fossil are rather unlikely like, even with a species as young as humans, most of the tracking of our progress across the continents is from finding rocks that we shaped into tools and weapons, not bones, also we just found evidence in the past couple years that has moved the first migrations into north america from 10kBCE to iirc 30kBCE
The 60s was a natural drought. In the 80s the lake had already flooded several small communities and was about to threaten thousands of more people. Major pumps were created to divert water away. The evaporation pools have been going on for over a century, used to collect salt. These evaporation pools are no different than what is done at other salt lakes.
I've spent my whole life here and it doesn't do it quite justice but awareness is greatly needed! On the way home from the store the lake would blind me, my brothers and sisters from the sun bouncing off during sunset. Now it's impossible to see it from the same spot.
this gives great perspective. Living in Salt Lake City, all we hear is that the lake has been shrinking for the past 2 decades (which it has), and that it will completely dry up and everyone will die from toxic dust when the wind blows. What this shows is that we are in approximately the same boat we were 60 years ago. Hopefully a wet weather cycle is around the corner that will refill our lakes and reservoirs.
While it is true there was a record low in the 60s, the current drought will surpass that soon. And unlike the 60s, there are now several man-made natural works that are designed to drain the lake quicker that weren't there before.
@@EmperorTigerstar I don't doubt it, though I hope we're wrong. This drought is really bad. And as others have pointed out, the usage of Utah's water is MUCH higher than it was back in the 60's. However, perspective is important. Way too many Chicken Littles running around screaming that the sky is falling.
@@holdenennis So climate change wasn't happening all throughout the industrial revolution? You know- when everything was powered by coal and we were killing beavers and bison en masse to make cool hats? We raped and pillaged the earth during the 1800's and early 1900's. There's no question we've cleaned up our act since the 60's. We can definitely still improve - a lot- but you might want to rethink your logic.
Losing a big salt water lake may not seem like a big loss to some but there definitely are devastating consequences if lost. For one thing the dry lakebed exposes toxic arsenic dust into the air, which causes health problems to surrounding communities. Several economic sectors are also effected such as local brine shrimp harvesting and the largest magnesium plant in the US. Also a smaller lake means less lake effect snow, or an abundance of snow that comes from the salty non-frozen lake in the winter, which creates a negative cycle of less snow to replenish the lake while also harming the local ski industry. One can only hope things recover as in years past but things are uncertain
@@bullmoosevelt4495 Read a little closer, the 1960s were the result of a drought, not the normal (the normal is about what you see in the late 80s-mid 90s if my memory is correct) The lake is currently at a new low (even though the area covered by water is a little bigger) in volume
As a Utahn, I kinda had to click on and like this. I went to the Natural History Museum (actually IN Salt Lake City) a couple months ago, and it was a seriously cool experience. One of the things they had, was a map of The Great Salt Lake on the floor--showing all its different stages--and it really hit home how much it had changed, when you could walk on the borders and physically SEE how different they had become. (It's a cool museum--they cover literally EVERY part of the Earth, including the inside of it and also clouds. :D)
A lot of comments here don't seem very aware of things. The lake being as small as it was in the 60s is not good at all. That was already a bad low for the lake. It doesn't mean we're due for a ton of rainfall or something. We live in Great basin, the empty dry desert wasteland my ancestors settled in cause' no one wanted it. While much of nothern Utah is much nicer that popular ideas of Utah would lead one to envision, it still is very dry.
@@Nosirrbro Ah, I hope my comment was not meant as a disrespect. Yes, the native peoples of the region were far more capable of living in the arid environment. The white settlers in the west however vastly underestimated the land. The situation of my ancestors was rather difficult. They could not just stay back east, as they were being constantly persecuted and attacked. Going west was their only option - and they needed a place away from other white settlers, so California and Oregon were out. As they settled in Utah, their interactions with American Indian tribes like the Utes and Shoshone were on the whole more positive than relations tribes had with other whites. There was of course, a lot of cultural disconnect. Stealing cattle from settlers was far from uncommon. The tribes saw it as sharing the resources of the land; the settlers saw it as theft. This led to some committing criminal acts against those who'd wronged them. Brigham Young and other church leadership protested against this, admonishing the settlers to trade with the tribes, be peaceful towards them, and give them to those in the tribes who were needy. In various places however, the settlers caused strain on the local resources. A horrible tragedy occurred due in part to this in northern Utah and southern Idaho - where the US army attacked and massacred a large body of northwestern Shoshone at Bear River, leading to a large decline in their presence. Such horrible military actions, though not nearly so dramatically awful in scope as that one, were not uncommon, and were done throughout the region. To my knowledge, such actions were only slightly influenced by the settlers, motivated more by people in the army searching for native people to shoot. It was a mixed story of friendship at times, tragedy in others, like the rest of the western United States. I can't say what my ancestors could've done better. They were ruthlessly persecuted in England and moved to Utah, pulling their goods by handcart. I need to look up my family history and find what interaction my ancestors had with the Shoshone, but I will not apologize for them making the decision to in all likelihood, save their lives.
@@WasatchWind people have been living in climates similar to that of northern Utah for thousands of years across the globe. The first white settlers entered the valleys and inserted their way of life without understanding how it worked.
It changes in size from season to season. No lake in the intermountain west has a stable size, and the great salt lake has less buffering mechanisms than most.
It changes a lot, though in recent years the increased water usage has prevented the cycle from completing. When I was a kid, the lake was visible from places like North Ogden. Now you can't even see the water from it's former shoreline.
I honestly think this has less to do with climate change and more to do with Salt Lake City getting a lot bigger and as such needing more water ( yes I know it’s salt water but we have the tech to de salt water and have had so for decades at this point)
It’s mostly because the rivers that feed the salt lake are being diverted to irrigate farm land. Granted this has been done since the 1840’s but it’s really picked up in the last few decades.
@@Revelator999 I don’t think a complete halt on irrigation would be the best solution since, again, Utah has been productively irrigated for over 170 years while the drying of the lake has only become severe during the past few decades. The big problem is that there are just plain too many people in the American Southwest with not enough water to support the population. This wasn’t a problem when Utah was a rural backwater but I foresee water becoming a big problem in a few years. I think a hundred years from now historians will wonder why millions of people migrated from the Rustbelt with some of the most fertile soil on earth into a dry desert waste that couldn’t support their numbers.
@@dcoulter2685 People moved to the Southwest because they wanted to move to California, but there wasn't enough housing in that state, so they moved to the next state over. Still, in this case, water should be shipped to Utah from the Rust Belt States or even from California since we can now purify salt water. Truth be told, there are no excuses. We need to stop relying so much on the rivers for our water and use other means. Otherwise, there will be an environmental disaster on unprecedented levels.
Climate change alarmism in a nut shell. I live right off the Atlantic and my dock was built in the 1960s. Still at the perfect height 60 years and trillions of tons of co2 later. Imagine that.
@@willfarinholt92 okay, but theres literally arsenic at the bottom of the lake, a ton of people have been moving in and using up more water from the rivers leading into the salt lake, and like.... I don't think the residents of salt lake city really want to be breathing in Arsenic dust. (i mean its already pretty terrible pollution-wise, but at least its not as poisonous as arsenic)
@@Revelator999 most of the problem stems from irrigation of the rivers anyways, there isnt much individuals can do (besides talking to legislators and doing what we can to save water) That being said, people really gotta stop watering their lawns so much. Seriously, its not that important to have a green lawn!
Wow, i thought this was just a recent thing. I've lived along the southern end of the lake basically my whole life and i've never actually gotten to see antelope island as an actual island.
Hey man, just wondering if I can use your music in my videos. I have prior, and if I need to remove them, I sure will. Im just asking because I dont have a lot of variety, and I would like to use some more tracks for my videos.
I have good news! The last two years we've had an insanely wet winter followed by a decently wet winter, and the lake has risen considerably. Still not at a great level, but it's bought us some time.
A zoom in on the location of the lake could have been a nice extra. I previously didn't know where this lake is located (let alone that it even exists).
Climate change is always the go-to explanation for this kind of thing as if its a known certainty but I'm dubious how large of an effect is has as opposed to population increase and natural climate variation.
Your investigation and format is impressive? Can you do one on the Texcoco lake in Mexico? It has dried up almost entirely in the last centuries with expansion of Mexico City and I would love to see how it dried up and what’s left of it.
The problem isn't the area, remember that the start of the video was a record low, followed by 20 years of exceptional rainfall. The problem is the fact that atm the lake much more shallow compared to the previous record
Ok hear me out. We take a pipeline from the California coast all the way to the salt lake, then we pump it back up. Its already salty so it couldn't hurt, and we slow down rising sea levels albeit with an incredibly small effect. Heck if we are going to fill it back up, might as well fill it all the way to Lake Bonneville levels right?
Lakes are shrinking while sea levels are rising. If we consume more filtered water from the sea, this can reduce our need for lake water, and help preserve them
I would assume they must have dams on many of the rivers that would flow into the lake, and that in combination with the evaporation ponds, you would assume that gives them a decent amount of control over the water level. I don't know much about the area, but for the lake to shrink despite all of those controls, it must be going through a very serious drought or be severely mismanaged by local governing bodies.
The three major rivers that feed it are the Jordan, Weber, and Bear. If you go to the mountains you will see a bunch of tiny reservoirs with gravel dams, those are basically the water source for the greater salt lake area, and I do believe because a lot of that is being diverted from the lake and the drought and climate change, is all causing factors to lower the lake down. We've been in a bad drought since around 2000, it actually flooded in the 80s
I don't know if I'm mistaken but in the video it seemed like the Lake grew a lot and then shrunk until it's a bit smaller than it's former size. So it didn't shrink that much compared to the original size.
a part of the lake was used to make the Willard Bay in the 60s, which probably was one of the reason for its growth. the shrinkage is not really natural, it is happening all around the world and a lot of lakes and rivers are getting all time lows
@@erikno2992 Not quite "all-time lows," as the "Hunger Stones" in the European rivers are again being exposed, along with their engraved dates showing that these levels have been reached many times over the last 500 years as part of a natural cycle.
@@antaine1916 the thing isn't only that the engravings are showing, you have to focus on *all time lows*, it is a disturbing level of dryness which we have reached yeah but now it's happening everywhere and it will keep happening, and also harsher.
@@willfarinholt92 The rains will come again, hasher than usual, but the soil just can't retain moisture as well anymore. Rising temperatures means both more rain and less retention.
So it's back where it was in the 60s again (mostly). What did they do in the 60s that worked so well that the lake grew so much in the following 20 years?
@@EmperorTigerstar Yeah, everyone always talks about how crazy the flooding was in the 80s and stuff. The problem is Utah has had record growth since then, especially stuff like Olympics attracting attention. The crisis is getting pretty bad. If the lake goes dry, it'll blow salt into the highly populated northern Utah, and kill everything. Like so many environmental problems, while individual conservation can help, it is unfortunately, down to large water users to change, mostly in the valley I believe.
Wait... am I stupid? Its only shrinking relative to its period of expansion following the 60s drought, and is still larger then it was then. Why wouldn't we just assume it will grow again at some point? And even if it doesn't, aren't many marshes and deserts former lake and sea beds? Why is the salt lake special?
It seems really dumb to deliberately evaporate part of an (albeit salty) lake in a drought prone region that struggles to provide enough water for its booming population
@@pain8117 By the time the water gets to the Great Salt Lake its been pretty tapped out. Most of the water for the Wasatch Front is grabbed from reservoirs in the mountains fed by snowmelt
No. The Soviets completely destroyed the Aral sea. The Americans contained the Great Salt Lake to stop it from flooding, with the lake never going any lower than it's natural levels.
They're presumably not using this salt lake water for crops or drinking, so, uh, where's it all running off to? WIth the Aral Sea and lake mead the culprit was all agriculture. Is it all just evaporation?
This is probably the closest equivalent to the Aral Sea that North America has.
The Aral sea of The USA
Ikr
Aral sea Placed In America Lol
You're forgetting Lake Texcoco in México, pretty much the same but even more curious cuz an entire city was built on top of it, and would face water problems, ironically
Not really, the Aral Sea is GONE, not just “receded to its 1960s levels”
As a native Utahn, I thank you for making this.
This environmental disaster in the making is quite possibly the worst one the west has seen yet, but nobody seems to be taking notice.
And to those who say this "isn't that bad" I urge you to research what the lake does for Utah, and why the dust storms that are appearing are beginning to get people sick.
There's several hundred thousand tons of arsenic resting on the lake bed for those who are too lazy. Now it's in the air.
I love how you can notice arid and wet periods. These water map animations are very good!
Love that diverse content you've been creating, consider doing expansion maps of some animal species including extinct ones. A good idea for a starter ; invasive Lionfish
OH I LIKE THIS
Especially prehistoric species for which we have a strong fossil or archeological record. Mammoths, sabre-tooth cats, etc. Some that made it into the modern era including aurochs.
Would it be possible to source enough historical data for the famous eradication of wolves in Britain? It's, like, part of their national myth. It's noted in I-don't-know-how-many timelines of British history.
I’d love to see this
@Benn M the problem is much of our fossil record is like at most a couple hundred examples of a species spread over a million years, it's hard to make an animation of that, simply put the conditions required to make a fossil are rather unlikely
like, even with a species as young as humans, most of the tracking of our progress across the continents is from finding rocks that we shaped into tools and weapons, not bones, also we just found evidence in the past couple years that has moved the first migrations into north america from 10kBCE to iirc 30kBCE
@@amycupcake6832 This is very valid. I'm stuck between a respect for data-driven inquiry and representative hypotheticals.
A lake being artificially altered in the 60's and shrinking as a result? Wonder where else I've heard that one before...
The 60s were a wild time man
The 60s was a natural drought. In the 80s the lake had already flooded several small communities and was about to threaten thousands of more people. Major pumps were created to divert water away. The evaporation pools have been going on for over a century, used to collect salt. These evaporation pools are no different than what is done at other salt lakes.
I've spent my whole life here and it doesn't do it quite justice but awareness is greatly needed! On the way home from the store the lake would blind me, my brothers and sisters from the sun bouncing off during sunset. Now it's impossible to see it from the same spot.
this gives great perspective. Living in Salt Lake City, all we hear is that the lake has been shrinking for the past 2 decades (which it has), and that it will completely dry up and everyone will die from toxic dust when the wind blows.
What this shows is that we are in approximately the same boat we were 60 years ago. Hopefully a wet weather cycle is around the corner that will refill our lakes and reservoirs.
While it is true there was a record low in the 60s, the current drought will surpass that soon. And unlike the 60s, there are now several man-made natural works that are designed to drain the lake quicker that weren't there before.
@@EmperorTigerstar I don't doubt it, though I hope we're wrong. This drought is really bad. And as others have pointed out, the usage of Utah's water is MUCH higher than it was back in the 60's.
However, perspective is important. Way too many Chicken Littles running around screaming that the sky is falling.
@@spencerthomason6558 There’s also climate change, which people didn’t even know about in the 60s and was much less of a problem then.
@@holdenennis So climate change wasn't happening all throughout the industrial revolution? You know- when everything was powered by coal and we were killing beavers and bison en masse to make cool hats? We raped and pillaged the earth during the 1800's and early 1900's. There's no question we've cleaned up our act since the 60's. We can definitely still improve - a lot- but you might want to rethink your logic.
@@spencerthomason6558 the population has also expanded significantly since then, and industry (most of which is still not green) has to keep up.
If the lake ever dries up completely, Salt Lake City residents are going to have to wear masks when they walk around outside.
Losing a big salt water lake may not seem like a big loss to some but there definitely are devastating consequences if lost. For one thing the dry lakebed exposes toxic arsenic dust into the air, which causes health problems to surrounding communities. Several economic sectors are also effected such as local brine shrimp harvesting and the largest magnesium plant in the US.
Also a smaller lake means less lake effect snow, or an abundance of snow that comes from the salty non-frozen lake in the winter, which creates a negative cycle of less snow to replenish the lake while also harming the local ski industry.
One can only hope things recover as in years past but things are uncertain
A next similar video could be done regarding Texcoco Lake and Mexico City.
really appreciate the sped-up version at the end!
Agreed!
0:39 That bite of '87 really made the changes to the Great Salt Lake 💀
WAS THAT THE BITE OF ‘87?!!?
The American version of The Kazakh-Uzbek lake "Aral sea"
I'm enjoying these Water Evaporation Videos By the way.
Oh Hi You are here too lol
@@ThatCrxEditor Yea.
@@bullmoosevelt4495 Read a little closer, the 1960s were the result of a drought, not the normal (the normal is about what you see in the late 80s-mid 90s if my memory is correct)
The lake is currently at a new low (even though the area covered by water is a little bigger) in volume
As a Utahn, I kinda had to click on and like this. I went to the Natural History Museum (actually IN Salt Lake City) a couple months ago, and it was a seriously cool experience. One of the things they had, was a map of The Great Salt Lake on the floor--showing all its different stages--and it really hit home how much it had changed, when you could walk on the borders and physically SEE how different they had become.
(It's a cool museum--they cover literally EVERY part of the Earth, including the inside of it and also clouds. :D)
Cool video! I'd love to see one about the Salton Sea next
A lot of comments here don't seem very aware of things. The lake being as small as it was in the 60s is not good at all. That was already a bad low for the lake. It doesn't mean we're due for a ton of rainfall or something.
We live in Great basin, the empty dry desert wasteland my ancestors settled in cause' no one wanted it. While much of nothern Utah is much nicer that popular ideas of Utah would lead one to envision, it still is very dry.
The native people definitely wanted it
@@Nosirrbro Ah, I hope my comment was not meant as a disrespect. Yes, the native peoples of the region were far more capable of living in the arid environment. The white settlers in the west however vastly underestimated the land.
The situation of my ancestors was rather difficult. They could not just stay back east, as they were being constantly persecuted and attacked. Going west was their only option - and they needed a place away from other white settlers, so California and Oregon were out.
As they settled in Utah, their interactions with American Indian tribes like the Utes and Shoshone were on the whole more positive than relations tribes had with other whites.
There was of course, a lot of cultural disconnect. Stealing cattle from settlers was far from uncommon. The tribes saw it as sharing the resources of the land; the settlers saw it as theft.
This led to some committing criminal acts against those who'd wronged them. Brigham Young and other church leadership protested against this, admonishing the settlers to trade with the tribes, be peaceful towards them, and give them to those in the tribes who were needy.
In various places however, the settlers caused strain on the local resources. A horrible tragedy occurred due in part to this in northern Utah and southern Idaho - where the US army attacked and massacred a large body of northwestern Shoshone at Bear River, leading to a large decline in their presence.
Such horrible military actions, though not nearly so dramatically awful in scope as that one, were not uncommon, and were done throughout the region. To my knowledge, such actions were only slightly influenced by the settlers, motivated more by people in the army searching for native people to shoot.
It was a mixed story of friendship at times, tragedy in others, like the rest of the western United States. I can't say what my ancestors could've done better. They were ruthlessly persecuted in England and moved to Utah, pulling their goods by handcart.
I need to look up my family history and find what interaction my ancestors had with the Shoshone, but I will not apologize for them making the decision to in all likelihood, save their lives.
@@WasatchWind people have been living in climates similar to that of northern Utah for thousands of years across the globe. The first white settlers entered the valleys and inserted their way of life without understanding how it worked.
Another good video from EmpirorTigerStar
Heh ^^
Another great video tigerstar
She's holding on much better than the Aral Sea
it took the aral sea ten years before it really started to shrink, only time will tell
Definitely different from what you normally get from this channel. It's quite cool though. Always up for some little different thing like this.
I did not know the Great Salt Lake has greatly changed in size throughout the past half-century.
It changes in size from season to season. No lake in the intermountain west has a stable size, and the great salt lake has less buffering mechanisms than most.
It changes a lot, though in recent years the increased water usage has prevented the cycle from completing.
When I was a kid, the lake was visible from places like North Ogden.
Now you can't even see the water from it's former shoreline.
Last time I was this early maps still showed Great Salt Lake and the Aral Sea and not the Great Salt Desert and the Aral Desert.
Lol
Greeetings everyone from the bottom of Lake Bonneville
Rest in peace to all to the fallen soldiers in the battle of the Salt Lake 🕊️
This is actually a pretty major problem. The lake is fairly toxic, and once the water dries up the arsenic deposits will be exposed to the wind.
This isn't really a shrinking this is a rise and fall.
Actually it is drying up since the water that is there is extremely shallow compared to the 60s
I honestly think this has less to do with climate change and more to do with Salt Lake City getting a lot bigger and as such needing more water ( yes I know it’s salt water but we have the tech to de salt water and have had so for decades at this point)
It’s mostly because the rivers that feed the salt lake are being diverted to irrigate farm land. Granted this has been done since the 1840’s but it’s really picked up in the last few decades.
@@dcoulter2685 We need to halt irrigation of the lake. Otherwise, environmental disaster will ensue
@@Revelator999 I don’t think a complete halt on irrigation would be the best solution since, again, Utah has been productively irrigated for over 170 years while the drying of the lake has only become severe during the past few decades. The big problem is that there are just plain too many people in the American Southwest with not enough water to support the population. This wasn’t a problem when Utah was a rural backwater but I foresee water becoming a big problem in a few years. I think a hundred years from now historians will wonder why millions of people migrated from the Rustbelt with some of the most fertile soil on earth into a dry desert waste that couldn’t support their numbers.
@@dcoulter2685 People moved to the Southwest because they wanted to move to California, but there wasn't enough housing in that state, so they moved to the next state over.
Still, in this case, water should be shipped to Utah from the Rust Belt States or even from California since we can now purify salt water. Truth be told, there are no excuses. We need to stop relying so much on the rivers for our water and use other means.
Otherwise, there will be an environmental disaster on unprecedented levels.
@@dcoulter2685 hmm USSR in 60s rings a bell
I'm only seeing it being about the same size or larger, though?
Climate change alarmism in a nut shell. I live right off the Atlantic and my dock was built in the 1960s. Still at the perfect height 60 years and trillions of tons of co2 later. Imagine that.
@@willfarinholt92 okay, but theres literally arsenic at the bottom of the lake, a ton of people have been moving in and using up more water from the rivers leading into the salt lake, and like.... I don't think the residents of salt lake city really want to be breathing in Arsenic dust. (i mean its already pretty terrible pollution-wise, but at least its not as poisonous as arsenic)
also, the 1960s were already at record lows, so we're back to record lows, more in the middle of the timelapse is closer to where it should be.
It is slightly bigger in area covered but it is much more shallow
What am I missing. It looks bigger in 2022 than it does in 1964.
This video is 2 hours old and great
Keep up the good work!
As a salt laker, this is hits hard
Are there any efforts to halt irrigation and save the lake? Or are you all bent on drying it up?
@@Revelator999 most of the problem stems from irrigation of the rivers anyways, there isnt much individuals can do (besides talking to legislators and doing what we can to save water)
That being said, people really gotta stop watering their lawns so much. Seriously, its not that important to have a green lawn!
@@syro33 That's what I mean. Are there any legislative efforts or environmental campaigns to get the legislature to halt irrigation of the rivers?
Wow, i thought this was just a recent thing. I've lived along the southern end of the lake basically my whole life and i've never actually gotten to see antelope island as an actual island.
Hey man, just wondering if I can use your music in my videos. I have prior, and if I need to remove them, I sure will. Im just asking because I dont have a lot of variety, and I would like to use some more tracks for my videos.
'88 made an... interesting evaporation pond.
It’s really bad, I have read that there are some legislative efforts to save the lake, but it probably won’t be enough. Lets hope they figure it out!
This really shows us the rise and fall of the Great Salt Lake Empire 💪💪💪💪💪
You should do a video on the Salton Sea it’s California’s largest lake and it’s a salt lake and it’s shrinking too.
As a Mormon land inhabitant, I appreciate this
Its bigger than it was in 1963 still...
Bigger in surface area does not mean higher amount of water. The great salt lake has always been an extremely shallow lake.
Do you think you can make a video on the decline of prairies in the Great Plains?
That'd be neat!
I have good news! The last two years we've had an insanely wet winter followed by a decently wet winter, and the lake has risen considerably. Still not at a great level, but it's bought us some time.
Good luck getting 1M subs
My home state's climate disaster was not what I wanted to wake up to.
A zoom in on the location of the lake could have been a nice extra. I previously didn't know where this lake is located (let alone that it even exists).
The music is "Practice Patience" by Shannon Kaiser and Kevin MacLeod.
It's actually "Overheat" by Kevin MacLeod.
@@EmperorTigerstar Oh. Shazam must have messed up then.
Interesting how the lake grew then shrank
Shrank, grew, and then shrank again
Great Salt Lake will be saved
how exactly? unless legislation gets passed to limit the irrigation, i dont really see how.
We need to fix our🌳forests🌳 and lakes
Interesting that little temporary lakes form and disappear depending on the year, I wonder if they name them.
Climate change is always the go-to explanation for this kind of thing as if its a known certainty but I'm dubious how large of an effect is has as opposed to population increase and natural climate variation.
Your investigation and format is impressive? Can you do one on the Texcoco lake in Mexico? It has dried up almost entirely in the last centuries with expansion of Mexico City and I would love to see how it dried up and what’s left of it.
I think this could have benefited from some visualization in the corner of how deep the lake is or how much water was actually lost
0:15 1963 Low
0:38 1987 Maximum
1:36 2022 Current Low
What country is this
This lake *really* wants to grow
Genial. Can you make map of Aral Sea and Bogotá River?
I didn't find a big difference, if it is compared to the sea of aral
The problem isn't the area, remember that the start of the video was a record low, followed by 20 years of exceptional rainfall. The problem is the fact that atm the lake much more shallow compared to the previous record
Ok hear me out. We take a pipeline from the California coast all the way to the salt lake, then we pump it back up. Its already salty so it couldn't hurt, and we slow down rising sea levels albeit with an incredibly small effect. Heck if we are going to fill it back up, might as well fill it all the way to Lake Bonneville levels right?
A little phallus-shaped evaporation pond shows up in 1988 @0:40 in the bottom left and it made me laugh.
The animation gives the appearance that it is roughly the same size as it started
It looks like it shrinks and grows constantly. If you were to use the 1960's as the model it should be dried up by now.
It might cover the same area but there's much less water in there, it's shallow af compared to the 60s
0:15 - 1:01
Years before my life
1:02 - 1:16
My life
I live relatively close to the Great Salt Lake, and I've heard of its shrinking. I don't I ever swam in it either.
Lakes are shrinking while sea levels are rising. If we consume more filtered water from the sea, this can reduce our need for lake water, and help preserve them
I would assume they must have dams on many of the rivers that would flow into the lake, and that in combination with the evaporation ponds, you would assume that gives them a decent amount of control over the water level. I don't know much about the area, but for the lake to shrink despite all of those controls, it must be going through a very serious drought or be severely mismanaged by local governing bodies.
from what I know not many dams on the rivers but I could be wrong
The three major rivers that feed it are the Jordan, Weber, and Bear. If you go to the mountains you will see a bunch of tiny reservoirs with gravel dams, those are basically the water source for the greater salt lake area, and I do believe because a lot of that is being diverted from the lake and the drought and climate change, is all causing factors to lower the lake down. We've been in a bad drought since around 2000, it actually flooded in the 80s
nice video
The same thing happened to the Caspian Sea
it's odd how big it was on the 80s
new emperortigerstar video boys take your popcorn!!!
Do a video about Urmia lake
Can u do the Aral Sea
He did
@@redacted7060 Oh
I’d say a solution would be to reduce the number of evaporation ponds.
I don't know if I'm mistaken but in the video it seemed like the Lake grew a lot and then shrunk until it's a bit smaller than it's former size. So it didn't shrink that much compared to the original size.
The original size (in this vid) is record low.
@@kjj26k Ah I see, thanks for the info!
0:38 Peak Of The Great Salk Lake
Wow. Never knew it was shrinking. Can you do peru civil war??
Keep
Filling
The lake!
I wonder what caused the lake to grow so much in the first place. Could this shrinkage just be a natural process?
a part of the lake was used to make the Willard Bay in the 60s, which probably was one of the reason for its growth. the shrinkage is not really natural, it is happening all around the world and a lot of lakes and rivers are getting all time lows
@@erikno2992 Not quite "all-time lows," as the "Hunger Stones" in the European rivers are again being exposed, along with their engraved dates showing that these levels have been reached many times over the last 500 years as part of a natural cycle.
@@antaine1916 the thing isn't only that the engravings are showing, you have to focus on *all time lows*, it is a disturbing level of dryness which we have reached yeah but now it's happening everywhere and it will keep happening, and also harsher.
@@erikno2992 “it will keep happening” lol you do not know that, as much as you want to believe you do
@@willfarinholt92 The rains will come again, hasher than usual, but the soil just can't retain moisture as well anymore.
Rising temperatures means both more rain and less retention.
Do urmia lake for the next upload
So it's back where it was in the 60s again (mostly). What did they do in the 60s that worked so well that the lake grew so much in the following 20 years?
Record rain, so nothing humans did in that case.
@@EmperorTigerstar Yeah, everyone always talks about how crazy the flooding was in the 80s and stuff.
The problem is Utah has had record growth since then, especially stuff like Olympics attracting attention.
The crisis is getting pretty bad. If the lake goes dry, it'll blow salt into the highly populated northern Utah, and kill everything.
Like so many environmental problems, while individual conservation can help, it is unfortunately, down to large water users to change, mostly in the valley I believe.
make a video on the shrinking of the Aral sea
I thought I was going to see another Aral Sea at first
1987 is when it started shrinking
At first I thought it meant Salt Lake in Turkey, which is also shrinking
in a lot of context, that salty lake in turkey is called "Lake Tuz"
Virgin sinking of Lake salt vs Chad Drowning of Lake Chad
I think the Great Salt Lake is the last remains of the North American ocean that existed in the age of the dinosaurs.
Ayo that southernmost evaporation pond tho
When I first saw this I was like: :o that’s where I live!
can you do lake chad next
it's just gonna be salt city soon
Wait... am I stupid? Its only shrinking relative to its period of expansion following the 60s drought, and is still larger then it was then. Why wouldn't we just assume it will grow again at some point? And even if it doesn't, aren't many marshes and deserts former lake and sea beds? Why is the salt lake special?
Largely due to animal agriculture who's using water from the feeding rivers.
So the lake was at its peak in 1986, and then later the droughts occured
This hurts to see. What we are watching is the forgotten Aral Sea of America/Salton 2.0
It seems really dumb to deliberately evaporate part of an (albeit salty) lake in a drought prone region that struggles to provide enough water for its booming population
The Great Salt Lake is unusable for any water, its much saltier than the ocean and super toxic, too
@@MidnightCheerios but isn't it fed by freshwater rivers?
@@pain8117 By the time the water gets to the Great Salt Lake its been pretty tapped out. Most of the water for the Wasatch Front is grabbed from reservoirs in the mountains fed by snowmelt
Alpine Glaciers every Year, if possible, next ?
Truly Is Great
Before 1 hour gang.
First 5 minutes gang
@@ianeons9278 Yes
Great Salt Lake = Aral Sea ( Central Asia )
No. The Soviets completely destroyed the Aral sea. The Americans contained the Great Salt Lake to stop it from flooding, with the lake never going any lower than it's natural levels.
They're presumably not using this salt lake water for crops or drinking, so, uh, where's it all running off to? WIth the Aral Sea and lake mead the culprit was all agriculture. Is it all just evaporation?
The feeder rivers are used for irrigation