By Charles F. Trentelman (Standard-Examiner staff )
Last Edit: 2 days 23 hours ago (Oct 18 2009 - 9:59pm)

OGDEN -- The Aral Sea, in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in central Asia, and Great Salt Lake are both large bodies of very salty, stinky water that don't get a lot of respect. But could Great Salt Lake and Utah end up like the Aral Sea, which is widely considered one of the largest man-made ecological disasters on the planet?

Probably not, said Dan Bedford, a professor of geography at Weber State University, although he said preservation of the lake is far from assured unless major policy changes are made. Bedford's research on the two lakes is the cover story on the September/October issue of Environment Magazine, a national peer-reviewed journal of environmental research. Bedford studies a variety of ecological and geographic issues around the Great Salt Lake and Utah. About four years ago, he noticed similarities between Utah's lake and the Aral Sea.

The Aral Sea used to be the fourth-largest inland sea on the planet. Like historic Lake Bonneville that once covered much of Utah, the Aral Sea was salt water, but was fed by rivers of fresh water. In the 1960s the Soviet Union decided to divert the major rivers flowing into the Aral Sea for agriculture. In the succeeding decades, the lake shrank 90 percent, destroying cities on its borders, devastating the fishing industry and creating an environmental wasteland of the lakebed and surrounding areas. Great Salt Lake is similar in that it, too, is a terminal lake with no outlet, surrounded by desert. As happened to the Aral, Bedford said, the biggest danger to Great Salt Lake is the continual demand for use of the water flowing into it coupled with a general feeling that water allowed to flow into it is wasted.

"I think the Aral Sea is a good analogy in some respects, not all," he said. Government officials in Russia felt "it deserves to die, it's a waste of water, which you also hear around here. Plus population growth made me think 'what are the potential risks?' "

In Utah, the threats to Great Salt Lake are two-fold, he said: natural and man-made.
The natural threat is global climate change which, if it continues, threatens to make Utah winters shorter and warmer. Warm temperatures cause more evaporation of the lake, he said, as well as more use of water from rivers. Shorter winters mean less snow runoff.

The man-made danger is development. Great Salt Lake is unique among the world's saline lakes in that it has a huge population center right next to it. As population on the Wasatch Front expands, more water from rivers flowing to the lake is used. A proposal to divert water from Bear Lake, the last major untapped river flowing into Great Salt Lake, could divert hundreds of thousands of acre-feet more from the lake.
There are dangers if Great Salt Lake is allowed to dry up, he said. Millions of birds depend on it, and a major brine shrimp industry is based in it.

"Ecologically, a reduced shoreline could mean greater crowding for bird populations, increasing the risk of diseases such as avian botulism," his article says. "Bird populations that depend on island nesting sites for protection from predators and human disturbance might become vulnerable, a particular concern for the American White Pelican colonies on Gunnison Island."

Other WSU researchers are already raising alarm bells about Utah birds, because of the lake's lower levels in drought years and industrial development. Dr. John Cavitt in the WSU Avian Biology Lab has said snowy plover populations in the lake's north arm are already threatened. Bedford said one major advantage Great Salt Lake has over the Aral Sea is that it is in the United States, where advocacy groups can speak out and push policymakers. The Soviet Union was a dictatorship, so even though some scientists there spoke against killing the Aral Sea, they were ignored.

In Utah, a variety of people sit at the table deciding the lake's future. Bedford said the governor's Great Salt Lake Commission, with people from environmental groups, industry and government, is a good place to start. "They've come up with a really good set of recommendations," he said. "The people on that are the real experts."
The best recommendation, he said, is to manage the Great Salt Lake as part of a huge drainage basin, including its rivers and mountain runoff areas, rather than just as a body of water. He said Mono Lake in California may be a better model for the future of Great Salt Lake than the Aral Sea. Mono Lake, another inland salt lake, began to shrink in the 1940s when Los Angeles tapped the rivers feeding it to supply the city. Mono Lake was in danger of becoming an ecological disaster until environmental activists, through a series of legal and political challenges, got water flow restored to the lake.