Drying Great Salt Lake could expose millions to toxic arsenic-laced dust | Hacker News Reader

Drying Great Salt Lake could expose millions to toxic arsenic-laced dust

smithsonianmag.com

26 pointssubharmonicon11 comments

Wonder how that compares to the dust from the above ground nuke tests in the Nevada desert back in the 40s and 50s. There was a movie filmed in Nevada in the 60s where almost everyone in it got cancer. See:; https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jun/06/downwinders-nuc...

Out of curiosity, how far could this blow?

Silt formerly of the Sahara blows to the Amazon. The Aral Sea's former seabed blows across the province. Will Colorado, Wyoming, etc be affected?

The Great Salt Lake sits in a big bowl, so it normally wouldn't get very far, geologically speaking. It would affect millions of people though.

There are compounds that can be sprayed on soil that lock it in place against erosion. It has to be redone every so often or if the soil is disturbed. For instance this:

https://fibramulch.com/products/tackifiers/earthbound-scient...

Probably this has been considered, and it would be quiet expensive.

We had a major discussion of this from the same original report a few days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34276519

Hadn’t seen that - thanks for the link to the previous discussion!

Can they cover it over? Like with a tarp weighed down with rocks? I welcome the reasons why this is a stupid idea.

It would require a very, very large tarp. The simpler solution is to stop drying it out to begin with, but that would require more or less halting extractive agriculture in Utah (as well as much of the rest of the Mountain West).

And in Utah's case, it's almost exclusively alfalfa. Over half the state's water use, for less than half a percent of its economy:

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/editorial/2022/12/04/why-its-...

The Great Salt Lake drainage basin is pretty large - about half of Utah, part of southern Idaho, and Nevada and Wyoming's borders with Utah.[1] But the economic value of that agriculture is small relative to its water use. 82% of Utah's water goes to agriculture, mostly hay, and most of the hay is alfalfa, which accounts for 41% of Utah's water use all by itself.[2] Yet that thirsty hay is less than 1% of Utah's GDP.[3] It's another demonstration of how bad our societal framework is at dealing with spread-out, gradual, externalized costs. It's a failure that I fear is going to painfully wreck us, probably during my lifetime.

[1]https://slco.org/watershed/know-your-local-waters/amazing-gr... [2]https://www.utahfoundation.org/2015/05/hay-one-crop-is-utahs... [3]https://www.fox13now.com/news/fox-13-investigates/fox-13-inv...

If a giant tarp would work, we probably would have started with the Salton Sea which is a paltry 350 square miles in area.

Of course, you could try covering the 1700 square mile Great Salt Lake with a tarp and then somehow maintaining it.

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