I think the should get the local sports teams involved. Put a little heat map down the side of the Jazz's jerseys. (I mocked this up on Twitter a few years back).
I live next to the lake (saw the remnants of it today on my bike ride).
Great Salt Lake Tracker
21–30 of 50 posts
Re: Great Salt Lake Tracker
#22It says that it is currently 7.0 feet below the minimum healthy water level and that the healthy water level is 4198 feet. I bet that will confuse a lot of people who will think that means the lake should be at least 4198 feet deep and it is 7 feet below that. Being 0.17% low doesn't seem like a major problem. Apparently though lake levels are measured relative to sea level, and Utah is around 4200 feet above sea lev…
Worse: The topography there is really flat. Every foot of lake elevation is a massive change in the surface area of the lake. I don't know the exact numbers, but it would not surprise me if there were a mile of change in lakeshore location for a foot of change of lake elevation.
Not sure about miles/foot, but an interesting example is the (newest) Great Saltair. At one point it was flooded over, now it’s about a mile and a half from the water.
Re: Great Salt Lake Tracker
#23I crave an industrial megaproject to solve this. Specifically: A pipeline from the ocean. But alas, only China has a social structure capable of getting projects of this scale done anymore. So I guess I'll keep tracking the AQI and keeping my kids indoors when it's bad.
I think the idea is a huge waste, but the Utah State Legislature already considered exactly this in 2022 (building a massive pipeline to the Pacific Ocean). https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2022/05/19/utah-legi... (archived non-paywall version: http://archive.today/GzuUD )
We really should just figure out how to be sustainable. I also think there is a hard reality people don't want to even consider talking about, which is the Southwest US is too overpopulated and overleveraged for the natural water resources available to it.
Re: Great Salt Lake Tracker
#24THIS IS A GRIFT. Joel Ferry, the executive director of Utah's DNR retooled state laws to allow water right leasing and promoted HB187 which allows you to hold water rights without developing them. He also happens to be a large shareholder in Bear River Canal Company and has been going around quietly buying up water rights from smaller canals and municipalities. Grow The Flow is closely aligned with Great Salt Lake Ri…
Can you spell out how the grift works? All I'm understanding from your post is that wealthy people are connected to the effort.
Re: Great Salt Lake Tracker
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always like the idea of megaprojects and several Utah legislators suggested this. It's kind of a dumb idea, though, when you think about it because the vast majority of Utah's diverted water is going towards farming alfalfa to feed livestock, so we could much more easily solve the problem by just importing these end products from a region that is better suited to their production than a desert.
Doesn’t scratch the itch, but I will concede that this is a fair point
If you want to do a megaproject, just cover a significant amount of the lake in reflective material. This will reduce evaporation, increasing the lake level. It would be very bad for the ecosystem, though, since it depends on sunlight.
Re: Great Salt Lake Tracker
#26THIS IS A GRIFT. Joel Ferry, the executive director of Utah's DNR retooled state laws to allow water right leasing and promoted HB187 which allows you to hold water rights without developing them. He also happens to be a large shareholder in Bear River Canal Company and has been going around quietly buying up water rights from smaller canals and municipalities. Grow The Flow is closely aligned with Great Salt Lake Ri…
Not really sure what the grift is here. Great Salt Lake Rising seems pretty reasonable reading their website https://gslrising.org/
To quote: “We are coordinating across 30+ organizations to get water back to the lake. The immediate goal: 500,000 acre-feet of annual water savings by 2027.
- Acquire and retire U.S. Magnesium water rights — 80,000 acre-feet annually
- Aggressively remove invasive phragmites consuming 100,000+ acre-feet per year
- Restore Newfoundland Basin — 30,000 acre-feet
- Partner with agricultural water users through split-season leasing and crop optimization
- Expand secondary water metering for accountability and conservation
- Purchase and lease water rights to permanently return water to the lake
- Refine policy tools to make leasing, delivery, and conservation easier”
Seems to be associated with an all star group of Utah philanthropists. Not seeing what the angle would be other than restoring the lake.
Re: Great Salt Lake Tracker
#27If you look at a satellite image of the Great Salt Lake [1], it looks like there's a digital seam/glitch between the north and the south half of the lake. In reality, a railroad was built through the middle of the lake in 1904, separating the water. The salinity of the north half has since become toxic to all organisms except some algae and cyanobacteria. [1] https://www.google.com/maps/@41.1985997,-112.4903027,20176…
Wow, this is wild to see.
Re: Great Salt Lake Tracker
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worse: The topography there is really flat. Every foot of lake elevation is a massive change in the surface area of the lake. I don't know the exact numbers, but it would not surprise me if there were a mile of change in lakeshore location for a foot of change of lake elevation.
Not sure about miles/foot, but an interesting example is the (newest) Great Saltair. At one point it was flooded over, now it’s about a mile and a half from the water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saltair_(Utah)
Friend of a friend went to an ICP show at Saltair... Dressed like a traditional clown (think Bozo the Clown)
Re: Great Salt Lake Tracker
#29I crave an industrial megaproject to solve this. Specifically: A pipeline from the ocean. But alas, only China has a social structure capable of getting projects of this scale done anymore. So I guess I'll keep tracking the AQI and keeping my kids indoors when it's bad.
The US is crisscrossed with gas and oil pipelines, many of them quite long. It’s imagination that constrains us mostly, not technology.
Re: Great Salt Lake Tracker
#30I crave an industrial megaproject to solve this. Specifically: A pipeline from the ocean. But alas, only China has a social structure capable of getting projects of this scale done anymore. So I guess I'll keep tracking the AQI and keeping my kids indoors when it's bad.
Disappointing to see you downvoted on hacker news of all places. Cmon, have some ambition.
A bunch of people here have no idea how bad the water crunch is. The oogala has been overdrawn for decades, and is a major source of agriculture water for much of the west and Midwest.
CO, UT, AZ, CA, NV etc all dramatically overdraw the Colorado river snopack and will have a reckoning soon enough. The west is also prone to mega droughts, making the problem much worse
Building a $100bn pipeline to irrigate the west absolutely should happen. We can pump it with miles of solar power, build enormous desalination plants, dramatically increase agricultural productivity and provide water to fight the heating effects of global warming.