The Spiral Jetty ...

 

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970). Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA. Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water. 1,500 ft. (457.2 m) long and 15 ft. (4.6 m) wide. Collection Dia Art Foundation. Photograph: William T. Carson, 2020 © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York

Poster child 101, the Spiral Jetty, located in the Great Salt Lake, shows, in indirect fashion, the increasing impact of GW writ large.

In 1972, just two years after it was completed, “Spiral Jetty” all but disappeared from view. Robert Smithson’s seminal earthwork was created at a time when the water levels of Utah’s Great Salt Lake were unusually low, making it easy to discern the sculpture’s vortex-like coil of black basalt rocks. But when heavy rain battered the area, the lake swelled and engulfed the spiral. It was the start of a three-decade-long period during which “Spiral Jetty” was largely submerged, save for a few brief reappearances; the waters at one point covered the rocks by 16 feet.

50 years later ...

But what Smithson, who died in 1973, could not have anticipated was that the Great Salt Lake, amid record drought, would shrink by two-thirds. Since 2002, the spiral has been bone-dry, its 6,650-ton mass of rock situated atop cracked, sun-scorched earth. 

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty (1970). Great Salt Lake, Utah, USA. Mud, precipitated salt crystals, rocks, water. 1,500 ft. (457.2 m) long and 15 ft. (4.6 m) wide. Collection Dia Art Foundation. Photograph: Matthew Coolidge, 2002 © Holt/Smithson Foundation and Dia Art Foundation / Licensed by Artists Rights Society, New York.