We already knew that climate change is partially contributing to the decline of the Great Salt Lake. Thanks to recent research, we now know that the decline of the lake is reciprocally contributing to climate change as well.
In a new study published in the journal One Earth, Melissa Cobo, a former masters student at Utah State University, and her advisor, Soren Brothers, found that 4.1 million tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses were released from the drying bed of the Great Salt Lake in 2020, the year the samples were collected. This would amount to a roughly 7 percent increase in Utah’s human-caused emissions, the authors calculated.
Brothers, a climate change curator at the Royal Ontario Museum, researches the effects of climate change on lakes, and how changes in aquatic systems can influence their greenhouse gas emissions. Prior studies have documented how carbon is emitted into the atmosphere when lakes dry out. But Brothers was particularly interested in discovering what part of the emissions from a major saline lake could be attributed to humans.
“This is the first time we’re saying, ‘This is something that’s on us,’” Brothers said in an interview with the Washington Post. Because the decline of the Great Salt Lake is mostly human caused, the study reports that “emissions are high enough to be accounted for in regional carbon budgets and warrant efforts to halt and reverse the loss of saline lakes around the world.”
Cobo, the former masters student, did much of the groundwork for the study, trekking across the dry lakebed to collect samples. She and her colleagues used a portable greenhouse gas analyzer to measure the amount of CO2 and methane emerging from various areas of the dry lakebed.
“As soon as you put that dome on the sand or exposed lake bed you start seeing that CO2 going up,” Brothers said in the same interview with the Post.
Though oceans are the world’s largest carbon sinks, absorbing about 25–30% of carbon dioxide emissions from human activities each year, lakes also do the important work of sequestering CO2 and other greenhouse gasses. When a lake dries up, many of those gasses are released into the atmosphere.
We know that if the Great Salt Lake dries up the exposed lakebed could become the largest source of carcinogenic particulate air pollution in North America, threatening the wellbeing of residents all along the Wasatch Front. We also now know that a dry lakebed will inflict further harm on our planet by releasing greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
We already have plenty of reasons to save the lake. This simply adds to that list. Though CO2 emissions make the task of saving the lake even that much more consequential, we should not be any less hopeful about our ability to prevent the most ominous outcomes.
Commissioner Steed and others are working hard to overcome the logistical and administrative barriers that stand in the way of saving the lake. But there are many political and cultural barriers that we will need to overcome collectively. In this fight, there is no substitute for diligent and prolonged public engagement. We have to move forward with both optimism and tenacity. Lawmakers must know that the lake remains a priority for Utahns.
To help save our community and our planet, we must start by saving the lake.