Tick, Tick, Tick ...

A satellite view of the Great Salt Lake captured in September 1987.Credit...EROS Center, U.S.G.S.

Right image - The Great Salt Lake in May 2021.Credit...EROS Center, U.S.G.S.

And so it goes. - K. Vonnegut

GW strikes again, this time it's the Great Salt Lake, evaporating 24/7, portending a potential ecological time bomb if nothing is done.  

Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, on land that used to be submerged by the Great Salt Lake.

A delicate balance ... now unbalanced

Now two changes are throwing that system out of balance. One is explosive population growth, diverting more water from those rivers before they reach the lake.

The other shift is climate change, according to Robert Gillies, a professor at Utah State University and Utah’s state climatologist. Higher temperatures cause more snowpack to transform to water vapor, which then escapes into the atmosphere, rather than turning to liquid and running into rivers. More heat also means greater demand for water for lawns or crops, further reducing the amount that reaches the lake.

End result - Phase One ...

Last summer, the water level in the Great Salt Lake reached its lowest point on record, and it’s likely to fall further this year. The lake’s surface area, which covered about 3,300 square miles in the late 1980s, has since shrunk to less than 1,000, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The salt content in the part of the lake closest to Salt Lake City used to fluctuate between 9 percent and 12 percent, according to Bonnie Baxter, a biology professor at Westminster College. But as the water in the lake drops, its salt content has increased. If it reaches 17 percent — something Dr. Baxter says will happen this summer — the algae in the water will struggle, threatening the brine shrimp that consume it.

While the ecosystem hasn’t collapsed yet, Dr. Baxter said, “we’re at the precipice. It’s terrifying.”.

Phase two ...

The long term risks are even worse. One morning in March, Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, walked out onto land that used to be underwater. He picked at the earth, the color of dried mud, like a beach whose tide went out and never came back.

The soil contains arsenic, antimony, copper, zirconium and other dangerous heavy metals, much of it residue from mining activity in the region. Most of the exposed soil is still protected by a hard crust. But as wind erodes the crust over time, those contaminants become airborne.

Clouds of dust also make it difficult for people to breathe, particularly those with asthma or other respiratory ailments. Dr. Perry pointed to shards of crust that had come apart, lying on the sand like broken china.

“This is a disaster,” Dr. Perry said. “And the consequences for the ecosystem are absolutely, insanely bad.”

Remember, this is just the beginning and ... we continue to do stupid shit.

Water pipes and construction intended for a new development near Salt Lake City.

Unsustanibility 101 ...

Dry lakebed surrounding Antelope Island in the Great Salt Lake (Image credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder)

On June 8, 2022, yours truly wrote a blurb titled Tick, Tick, Tick ... detailing an uncomfortable truth about the Great Salt Lake and the potential of toxic chemicals, created by mining back in the day, being released, thus threatening the existence of Salt Lake City as the lake continues to dry out thanks to 74% of diverted lakewater being used for unsustainable agricultural practices.

And we haven't even discussed the ongoing building boom happening in the city itself.

Utah's Great Salt Lake, the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere, could be set to disappear within the next five years, exposing millions of people to the toxic dust trapped in the drying lake bed, according to scientists.

The urgent warning, issued in a Jan. 4 report by a team of 32 ecologists and conservationists, says that the lake has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area since 1850 and is facing "unprecedented danger." Without emergency measures to add an additional 326 billion gallons (1,234 billion liters) of water to the lake per year, or enough water to fill nearly 500,000 Olympic-size swimming pools, it could pass the point of no return by the end of 2024. 

The Great Salt Lake provides a habitat for around 10 million migratory birds and brings Utah roughly $2.5 billion a year in economic activity, but, after drying at record rates since 2020, is currently sitting at 19 feet (5.8 meters) below its natural average levels, the report found. Scientists and conservationists pin the blame squarely on excessive water use by the region's alfalfa and hay farms, which take 74% of the many trillions of gallons of the total diverted lakewater to irrigate their vast operations, according to the report. If the lake is to be saved, overall water usage must be rapidly cut by 30 to 50%. 

Good luck with that because ... metropolitan Salt Lake City has barely enough water to support its current population. And it is expected to grow almost 50 percent by 2060.

Water pipes and construction intended for a new development near Salt Lake City.

Same as it ever was - Talking Heads

Stratos ...

Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

Worse than tulips, totally insane but it's money, right? Silicon no longer works, period. Between the heat issue and the fragility issue, the need to move to photonics is now but according to the "boffins" wanting to build this monster, it doesn't matter. Another question to ask is, for what problem is this project intended to solve and, because tech never sleeps, will the tech be current when this bad boy is turned on? Simply incredible without question.

Dubbed the Stratos Project and backed by the celebrity venture capitalist Kevin O’Leary, the sprawling facility will devour up to nine gigawatts of energy, its developers say, which is more than double the electricity used by the entire state. 

That epic energy bill comes with another cost, albeit the kind that won’t show up on the developers’ books. On top of the nine gigawatts of power, the facility will produce another 7 to 8 gigawatts of energy in the form of waste heat, according to Robert Davies, a physics professor at Utah State University who shared his calculations with The Salt Lake Tribune.

That brings its entire “thermal load” to a jaw-dropping 16 gigawatts

It gets better

Petitioners react as the Box Elder county commission announces approval of a large datacenter
on 4 May 2026 in Tremonton, Utah. Photograph: Natalie Behring/Getty Images

The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder county in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.

Last week, the project was approved by the county’s commissioners, despite thousands of objections lodged by Utah residents. Environmentalists have warned that Stratos could imperil the Great Salt Lake ecosystem, including a critical migratory bird habitat, which is already under severe stress.

The lake is shrinking due to water diverted for agriculture and the impact of the climate crisis, placing inhabitants of the nearby Salt Lake City at possible risk of toxic dust clouds as the lake bed dries up.

Better still ...

Channeling Stratos ...

Exacerbating the issue, the Stratos Project is anticipated to use on-site gas power generators that run round the clock, allowing the facility to operate off the local power grid — a common modus operandi for large scale data centers that need a way to quickly secure huge amounts of electricity. 

The problem, however, is that this concentrates all the waste heat into the same area, when it’s typically dispersed far from the power plant itself at the homes and businesses it sends power to. 

And that area, in the case of the Stratos Project, is the Hansel Valley, which already acts as a bowl for trapping air.

The magnitude of the disruption is difficult to comprehend. In a jaw-dropping illustration, Davies calculated that the project would be the “equivalent of about 23 atom bombs worth of energy dumped into this local environment every single day.”

“What happens if you deposit that much energy continuously into a topography like this?” Davies told The Salt Lake Tribune. “Right at the north end of the Great Salt Lake, a watershed that’s in collapse. A high desert environment? A valley?”

If nuclear bombs are hard to wrap your head around, try Walmart Supercenters. In acreage, the Stratos facility will be equal to about 2,000 of those big box stores — but its energy footprint will be that of 40,000 Walmart supercenters, or 2,000 Walmarts stacked 20 deep, he wrote in a summary of his findings.

WTF applies

BRT wrote about the ticking time bomb regarding the Great Salt Lake. Read it if you dare.

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. 

A Divine Obsession

A must read, Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality? is a touching tail about a Japanese researcher and his coterie of immortal jellyfish, the notoriously difficult to breed Turritopsis dohrnii, that may unlock the code to immortality.

But several biologists in Genoa, fascinated by Sommer’s finding, continued to study the species, and in 1996 they published a paper called “Reversing the Life Cycle.” The scientists described how the species — at any stage of its development — could transform itself back to a polyp, the organism’s earliest stage of life, “thus escaping death and achieving potential immortality.” This finding appeared to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.

Nathaniel Riche's story goes on, describing the caring efforts of Shin Kubota in keeping his brood alive as he feels the importance of this tiny organism could change the course of life on earth in ways that go beyond imagination.


For the last 15 years, Kubota has spent at least three hours a day caring for his brood. Having observed him over the course of a week, I can confirm that it is grueling, tedious work. When he arrives at his office, he removes each petri dish from the refrigerator, one at a time, and changes the water. Then he examines his specimens under a microscope. He wants to make sure that the medusas look healthy: that they are swimming gracefully; that their bells are unclouded; and that they are digesting their food. He feeds them artemia cysts — dried brine shrimp eggs harvested from the Great Salt Lake in Utah. Though the cysts are tiny, barely visible to the naked eye, they are often too large for a medusa to digest. In these cases Kubota, squinting through the microscope, must slice the egg into pieces with two fine-point needles, the way a father might slice his toddler’s hamburger into bite-size chunks. The work causes Kubota to growl and cluck his tongue.

“Eat by yourself!” he yells at one medusa. “You are not a baby!” Then he laughs heartily. It’s an infectious, ratcheting laugh that makes his round face even rounder, the wrinkles describing circles around his eyes and mouth.

Shin Kubota

Creative activity could be described as a type of learning process where teacher and pupil are located in the same individual.  - Arthur Koestler 

Be Bold

"Federal internet regulators wants your help coming up with the first ever, national broadband plan — which they must deliver to Congress next February. At stake are billions of dollars in government funds, the nation’s standing in world broadband rankings, the digital divides between rich-and-poor and town-and-country, and perhaps even the future of the U.S. economy.

President Barack Obama has called for the United States to become a leader again in internet access — now that the nation pitifully trails Europe, Japan and Korea in both speed and affordability."

To that end, Wired put together a letter containing some excellent suggestions, the most important of which is... Be Bold.

"For instance, many readers support a model where the internet’s pipes aren’t owned by ISPs anymore. They’d rather multiple companies be able rent the shared lines and compete on service, a model that has worked in Britain. Australia uses a version of that model to build a national fiber and wireless network that will serve all Australia." (This model also applies to Japan and Korea as well.)

"Others argued that cities that want to lay their own broadband should be allowed to do so, and the nation’s incumbent telecoms need to stop fighting them at the ballot box and in court:

“We need to stop giving these companies this freedom to stop or delay buildouts of municipal fiber networks. If I had enough money to fund UTOPIA in Salt Lake, I’d jump on it in a heartbeat but I know that I would be facing at least a 2 or 3 year battle in courts with Qwest and Comcast…. If they’re not going to take us on the path to true broadband access then these companies should step aside!”

Last but not least, the article points the way for us to make comments of our own by clicking here.

Who knows, perhaps the government might actually get this right with a little help from people like you and me because after all, the nation's future depends on it. :)

Draught 101

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor·Conditions during the first week of June.

Anybody buying a house in AZ is nuts.

An intense drought is gripping the American West. Extreme conditions are more widespread than at any point in at least 20 years, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, the government’s official drought-tracking service.

And the hottest months of summer are still to come.

The same applies to FL.

Source: U.S. Drought Monitor

Any questions?

It's getting worse ...

A temperature "misery index" shows peak levels across the Southwest (orange and yellow), and the upper air flow shows how the jet stream is being pushed north, away from the heat dome parked over the Four Corners region. (Earth.nullschool.net)

By the numbers: In Death Valley, Calif., which holds the distinction of having recorded the hottest temperature on Earth, the June high-temperature record of 129°F is likely to be threatened Wednesday and Thursday. Death Valley hit 124°F on Tuesday.

The average temperature there for this time of year is about 110°F.

Several noteworthy records were tied or fell on Tuesday, including:

• 107°F in Salt Lake City, tying the city’s all-time record for anytime of the year and beating its previous record for hottest temperature in June, which had stood at 106°F.
• Billings, Montana also tied its all-time hottest temperature on record for any month with a high of 108°F on Tuesday.
• Laramie, Wyo. tied its all-time high temperature record of 94°F on Tuesday.

Again, we did it to ourselves.

Ode to concrete - Roman Style :)

Concrete, modern style, craps out within 30-50 years, depending on the weather, while concrete, Roman style, lasts millennia, even when submerged, thanks to a secret sauce just beginning to be understood thanks to esoteric tech of the sophisticated kind.

He (Pliny the elder) might be pleased, then, to see an ancient technology that he himself admired taking on a modern relevance and novelty. Who, Pliny wondered, could help but be surprised at the way the Roman harbor infrastructure, made from a mix of lime and volcanic ash, overcomes entropy, “forming a barrier against the waves of the sea, becoming changed into stone the moment of its immersion, and increasing in hardness from day to day—more particularly when mixed with the cement of Cumae,” an ancient city in Naples?

The geologist and geophysicist Marie Jackson, of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, shares Pliny’s admiration for these still-standing structures, and has scoured ancient Roman texts in hopes of uncovering the recipe that makes them so durable. The goal would be to revive Roman concrete, and their building techniques, for the modern age—but, alas, her efforts were to no avail.

So she’s been working backwards. In “Unlocking the secrets of Al-tobermorite in Roman seawater concrete,” a study she and her colleagues published in 2013, they confirmed, via trace element analyses at the Advanced Light Source, an X-ray synchrotron at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, that drill cores of a 2000-year-old block submerged in the Bay of Pozzuoli near Naples came “from Flegrean Fields volcanic district, as described in ancient Roman texts.” The samples contained aluminum tobermorite, a rare mineral and not an ingredient in conventional concrete, which accounted for their great durability and strength. In another study published this month, the researchers found that the aluminum tobermorite grew out of a silicate mineral common to volcanic ash, called phillipsite, spurred by ocean contact. “We’re looking at a system that thrives in open chemical exchange with seawater,” Jackson said.

The tobermorite’s long plate-like crystals grant the concrete an unusual flexibility under stress that increases with time submerged. “It’s a very rare occurrence in nature,” Jackson said. By contrast, modern concrete, made from a mix of Portland cement and coarse aggregate, corrodes in seawater within decades, making the application of Roman concrete, Jackson noted, an enticing option for steel reinforcement-free seawalls that guard against rising sea levels.

Pliny the Elder would be pleased.

The Limits to Growth ...

Some of the last homes currently being built in Oakley, Utah. The town has cut off new development because it doesn’t have enough water to go around.Credit...Lindsay D’Addato for The New York Times

In A Prescient Precursor, BRT discussed how forward thinking MIT's 1972 Limits to Growth truly was in terms of describing how business as usual was plundering earth's resources at an alarming rate. Well, a first salvo in proving this prediction to be true revolves around a small town known as Oakley, Utah thanks, in part, to global warming.

OAKLEY, Utah — The mountain spring that pioneers used to water their hayfields and now fills people’s taps flowed reliably into the old cowboy town of Oakley for decades. So when it dwindled to a trickle in this year’s scorching drought, officials took drastic action to preserve their water: They stopped building.

A harbinger of things to come?

So this spring, Oakley, about an hour’s drive east of Salt Lake City, imposed a construction moratorium on new homes that would connect to the town’s water system. It is one of the first towns in the United States to purposely stall growth for want of water in a new era of megadroughts. But it could be a harbinger of things to come in a hotter, drier West.

One never knows, do one? - Fats Waller