University of Utah
Thanks to upstream diversions and climate change, Utah’s Great Salt Lake has shrunk by 70% since 1989, exposing about 800 square miles of playa and mudflats—along with numerous curiosities.
While a potential environmental catastrophe, the lake’s dewatering presents numerous research opportunities for University of Utah geoscientists, including several who are looking to characterize the extent, characteristics, chemistry and flow of a mysterious, mostly freshwater aquifer under the playa.
In a pair of studies coming out this year, a team led by geophysicist Mike Thorne deployed electrical resistivity tomography, or ERT, lines in 30 locations around the lake’s southern and eastern margins to build 2D cross-sectional images of the subsurface.
Patchwork beneath the surface
The researchers’ discoveries, including a hidden mirabilite layer near the historic Saltair, are adding to a growing inventory of new clues U scientists are generating into the previously unknown natural processes at play under and in the lake…