A Utah lawmaker has proposed a new idea to mitigate Great Salt Lake dust: build berms to temporarily trap water and form a crust over the exposed lakebed. Once the surface has hardened, that water will be released back to the lake, Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz told FOX13.
The idea might sound like an innovative way to reduce dust and protect public health, but this short-term “solution” addresses only a symptom of the crisis facing Great Salt Lake, risks damaging the lake’s fragile ecology and fails to grapple with the root of the lake’s decline: Utahns using too much water.
Around the world, governments have tried to engineer their way out of collapsing saline lakes — building berms, dykes and pipelines and even redirecting rivers. But no matter how innovative or costly, these geoengineering efforts have consistently failed to address the root problem: not enough water.
One of the starkest cautionary tales is the Aral Sea, once the fourth-largest lake in the world. After massive water diversions drained its tributaries, officials attempted to reverse the damage with a series of expensive dykes and artificial barriers. While a small portion of the lake in Kazakhstan has seen limited recovery thanks to sustained inflows and a managed dam, the vast southern basin became an ecological and economic wasteland. Fishing towns were left miles from the waterline, toxic dust storms intensified and entire communities were forced to relocate.
The only permanent solution to addressing the budding public health crisis caused by Great Salt Lake dust events is reducing human water consumption in the watershed and maintaining the lake at a healthy level. Without restoring consistent natural inflows, no amount of berm-building can bring a dying lake back to life.
Building berms could temporarily reduce dust from certain hotspots, but it is a Band-Aid solution and comes with major ecological risks. As Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed told FOX13, trapping water in isolated areas can disrupt the lake’s delicate chemistry. When fresh water is kept out of the lake’s main body, salinity levels can spike. This problem is illustrated by the causeway currently dividing the lake in two, which has created a hyper-saline, inhospitable “North Arm” where only halophiles can survive. Elevated salinity can devastate brine shrimp populations and the millions of migratory birds that rely on them. In a system this complex, well-meaning interventions can quickly backfire.
This proposal also diverts attention — and potentially resources — from the only real solution: getting water to the lake. Millions of dollars that would hypothetically be spent on berms and dykes should be used to fund water markets, wetland restoration and subsidies for agriculture to switch to more water-efficient crops and technologies. Until we address those diversions and secure long-term flows into the lake, dust will continue to blow, salinity will continue to rise and the lake’s collapse will inch closer. Temporary fixes like berms might be tempting because they’re visible, controllable and give the illusion of progress. But they’re not solutions.
If Utah wants to avoid the fate of so many other dried-up saline lakes, we need to prioritize what actually works: getting more water to the lake and letting it do what it has done for thousands of years — heal itself.