- The Great Salt Lake ended 2025 at its third-lowest recorded level, raising alarms that exposed lakebed dust could threaten air quality along the Wasatch Front.
- State leaders say restoring the lake requires about 800,000 acre-feet of water and are exploring solutions such as incentivizing farmers to sell water and transporting water from other basins.
- While long-term solutions remains uncertain, Utah is investing in dust mitigation and monitoring to manage immediate health risks.
As 2025 came to a close, the surface of Great Salt Lake’s south arm sat at 4,191.1 feet — the third-lowest recorded elevation in more than 120 years.
On Wednesday morning, the Kem Gardner Policy Institute invited state and local leaders to discuss why the lake’s slow shrinkage is concerning and offer solutions.
The conversation circled largely around dust. The Great Salt Lake’s low water-levels expose potentially harmful materials to the wind, which sucks them up in the form of dust and carries them along the Wasatch Front.
To pull the lake out of its currently-labeled “serious adverse effects” status, simulations show that about 800,000 acre-feet should be added, Great Salt Lake Commissioner Brian Steed said Wednesday.
For context, 800,000 acre-feet of water is equivalent to about 261 billion gallons of water. That’s enough to fill nearly 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools or irrigate 300 square miles of alfalfa fields for one year.
“The take-home message that we can all take to heart is that humans do have an impact on this lake, and our choices do matter,” Steed said.
How do you get 261 billion gallons of water into Great Salt Lake?
For a long time, agriculture was the largest water consumer in Utah, but now, state researchers are finding that municipal and industrial water consumption are on the rise.
This is expected, “just based on the loss of agriculture in those areas for municipal and industrial to continue to increase,” Steed said.
During a panel discussion with Steed and Utah Department of Natural Resources Executive Director Joel Ferry, Rep. Casey Snider, R-Paradise, said the question of how to “incentivize the actual action of improving the system” will be a large focus of the upcoming Utah legislative session.
Although water is increasingly consumed domestically and by businesses, the Great Salt Lake Commissioner’s office is proposing a chance for farmers to sell their water to the lake at around $300 per acre.
“We’re helping our producers realize that water can be a commodity that is part of their crop rotation,” Hannah Freeze, the deputy Great Salt Lake commissioner, said.
She added, “But it’s not black and white. We don’t want our producers to stop farming and send all of their water to the lake.” As crops fluctuate year to year in profit margins, farmers could opt to sell their water when it would be a more lucrative alternative.
Beth Neilson, a Utah State professor and director of the Utah Water Research Laboratory, added that the state is looking at transporting water from the Newfoundland Water Basin into Great Salt Lake.
In the 1980s, Salt Lake experienced massive rainfall and snow that prompted the state to pump water from the Great Salt Lake into the West Desert. Although it’s not consistent, the area still accumulates 20,000 to 50,000 acre feet “pretty regularly,” Neilson said.
If we can’t fill it up, how do we mitigate dust?
As Great Salt Lake’s water line has receded in Farmington Bay, more than 120 square miles in the area became exposed, creating dust “hotspots.”
Neilson pointed to research that found temporarily flooding this area in the state’s cooler months is looking “quite promising” to mitigate dust.
But to go full throttle with dust mitigation, Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah, said the state needs more data.
Perry has been studying Great Salt Lake dust for more than a decade, and in early 2025, he said he realized that the state “didn’t have enough air quality monitors in northern Utah” to provide the kind of data needed for policymakers to figure out how to mitigate dust and what actions would be appropriate.
When Perry compared the number of dust monitors around Great Salt Lake to others smaller saline lakes in California, he saw that Utah was “severely lacking.”
In response, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox submitted a budget request for $650,000 of ongoing money for dust monitoring, and the legislature passed $150,000 of ongoing funding for a dust monitoring network.
“Those instruments are being installed as we speak,” Perry said.
As Utah’s legislative session approaches, Snider and former Rep. Joel Ferry, R-Brigham City, expressed optimism for how the state is handling the issue.
“I don’t much buy into protests and signs and the dancing spiraling birds at the capitol. I don’t think it solves the problem,” Snider said. “There are actual things we can do outside of the protesting and politics.”
Ferry added, “Utah will be that beacon to the rest of the world. You can be prosperous, and you can protect your environment. You can strike that balance that we all want.”