The Great Salt Lake Is Drying, Antarctica Is Sweltering — The Knock-On Effects Of Climate Change Are Everywhere – CleanTechnica

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As the Great Salt Lake shrinks in size in Utah, the newly exposed former lake bottom is contributing millions of tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere that have not been previously accounted for in that state’s emissions totals. At the same time, researchers are reporting that temperatures in Antarctica are as much as 50 degrees hotter this year than normal. What we humans need to do, as good stewards of the one and only Earth we will ever have, is to come to an understanding that these two apparently unrelated events tens thousand miles apart are related.

Many of us proto-progressives used to watch a TV show called West Wing, in which a fictional American government struggled to make intelligent policy decisions in the face of unrelenting political opposition. Among the many triumphant cinematic coups engineered by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was this gem below, which analogizes competent governance to a game of chess. It is entitled “Look At The Whole Board” and it is nothing short of brilliant. In the effort to make meaningful headway in the campaign to avoid turning the Earth into a baked potato inhospitable to human life, it makes a powerful statement. We cannot afford to see these two pieces of climate news as unrelated to each other. They are inextricably intertwined and we need to see the whole board in order to address them effectively.

The Great Salt Lake Is Disappearing

The Great Salt Lake in Utah — the body of water from which Salt Lake City derives its name — is the 8th largest saline lake in the world. A remnant of the last Ice Age, it has no natural exit. Any water that leaves the lake does so by evaporation or by human activity such as irrigation and municipal purposes. The Great Salt Lake has been shrinking for the past several decades, leaving dry lake bed behind where once there were marinas.

In a study published on July 25, 2024, in the journal One Earth, researchers at Utah State University say newly exposed lake bed emitted carbon dioxide and methane that together were the equivalent of 4.1 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020. According to the Salt Lake Tribune, this represents the first time that greenhouse gas emissions from the lake bed have been measured.

The US Energy Information has reported that Utah generally emits 60 million tons of carbon dioxide per year from burning fossil fuels. Including the lake bed emissions — which are associated with humans diverting water for farming, mining, and serving a growing population — resulted in a 7% increase to Utah’s total emissions. “For something that’s not even been accounted for at all in mitigation plans, it’s a really big number,” said lead author Melissa Cobo, who graduated from Utah State University with a master of science in watershed science last year.

That figure is likely on the conservative side, said Soren Brothers, a co-author of the study who was Cobo’s adviser when he was an assistant professor at Utah State. He is now a climate change curator at Canada’s Royal Ontario Museum. Micro-organisms release carbon dioxide as they feed on materials exposed as the Great Salt Lake dries out. Recently exposed areas emit more greenhouse gas than spots that have been uncovered for a while, but the study only measured emissions from areas that have been exposed for over a decade.

Since the lake is terminal — meaning that it has no outlets like rivers or streams leaving it — “everything that’s flowed into that lake over the last 10,000 years or so since it’s existed has ended up on that big lake bottom,” Brothers said. As the lake bed has been exposed to air, “it’s a huge buffet for bacteria to consume. Suddenly they have access to 10,000 years of deposited organic matter that’s been off-limits until then. It’s good that people understand that there are consequences to our actions and how we’re dealing with our waters, and this is arguably the most global of those consequences,” Brothers said.

Carbon emissions are not the only consequences of the drying out of the Great Salt Lake. According to The Guardian, the declining water level in the lake has exposed a dusty lake bed laced with arsenic, mercury, lead, and other toxic substances that threaten to increase rates of respiratory conditions, heart and lung disease, and cancers. As its volume shrinks, the lake is also becoming saltier and more uninhabitable to native species like brine shrimp. The Great Salt Lake is also a favorite stopping off point for up to 10 million migratory birds each year, but the changes in its topography may endanger those migrations.

“I think this research adds just one more to a long list of reasons we should be working to preserve the lake,” John Lin, an atmospheric scientist and associate director at the University of Utah’s Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy, told The Guardian. In a study published in June, Lin and his colleagues also found that exposure to particulate pollution from the lake bed was highest for Pacific Islanders and Hispanic residents, and lowest among white residents — likely because minority and low-income communities are more likely to lie in the path of wind-blown dust from the lake. Preserving the lake’s levels would decrease dust pollution and reduce stark racial disparities in exposure to air pollution, the researchers found.

Extreme Heat In Antarctica

9,199 miles south of Salt Lake City, climate scientists are noting some highly disturbing climate trends. A record breaking heat wave is happening at what should be the coldest time in Earth’s coldest place. Temperatures since mid-July have climbed as much as 50º F above normal over parts of Antarctica, and unseasonable warmth could continue through the first half of August. That has scientists concerned about what it could mean for the future health of the Antarctic continent, and the consequences it could inflict for millions of people across the globe.

According to CNN, the latest data show that temperatures in portions of East Antarctica at this time of year are typically between -58º and -76º Fahrenheit, but this year are now closer to between -13º to -22º F. That’s cold, but Antarctica’s typical winter cold should be operating at a level unfathomable to most people.

Summer-like heat in the dead of winter — even if much of the continent is still below freezing — is an alarming development for a place more capable than any other of generating catastrophic sea level rise as fossil fuel pollution continues to drive global temperatures upward. Most of the Earth’s ice is stored here. If it all melted, that would raise average global sea levels by well over 150 feet. Even smaller ice formations like the so-called Doomsday Glacier could raise sea levels by 10 feet, which would be catastrophic for many of the world’s coastal communities.

It’s possible more heat waves like this will happen in future winters, which could leave the icy continent less fortified for its hottest season — summer — and more vulnerable to melting during subsequent heat waves, said David Mikolajczyk, a research meteorologist with the Antarctic Meteorological Research and Data Center at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Increased Antarctic melting could also potentially alter global oceanic circulations, Mikolajczyk told CNN. These circulations play an outsized role in making the planet’s climate habitable.

“I’m sure more (impacts) will emerge with time as we understand (this heat wave) better, but at the moment, it’s just a case of astonishment really, what we’re seeing,” Thomas Bracegirdle, deputy science leader for the British Antarctic Survey’s Atmosphere, Ice and Climate team, said. He told CNN the temperatures in this event were record breaking and were an important signal of what could be coming in the longer term. Heat waves of this magnitude should be quite rare in Antarctica and scientists aren’t yet certain that they are occurring more frequently, but that may be changing.

They also contributed significantly to the new hottest day on Earth record in late June, according to an analysis from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. This is the second significant heat wave Antarctica has endured in the last two years. During the previous in March 2022, temperatures in some locations reached up to 70 degrees above normal, the most extreme temperature departures ever recorded in this part of the planet.

The Takeaway

We all know the reason why the Great Salt Lake is shrinking and Antarctica is heating up, don’t we? Making burning fossil fuels the basis of our civilization. We add the heat of several hundred thousand atomic bombs to our environment every single day and are amazed when our world gets hotter. Now, clearly we can’t quit fossil fuels cold turkey. Life as we know it would come to an abrupt — and painful — end. But you don’t have to be clairvoyant to see what is heading our way and to know we are dragging our feet when it comes to doing what we all know needs to be done.

We rationalize, we temporize, we make excuses, and we close our minds to what our senses are telling us, which is that we need to pick up the pace of change — a lot — if our children and grandchildren are to have any hope of enjoying life on Earth the way we did. Not to put too fine a point on it, we have allowed the corporations who want to prolong the fossil fuel era to capture our political institutions in order to extend its hegemony over energy. That has to end so that forward progress can accelerate before time runs out.

In other words, we need to see the whole board — in Salt Lake City, in Antarctica, in warming oceans, dying coral reefs, and disappearing insects. Perhaps a word from Carl Sagan might be useful here. “For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.” In fact, it may be essential to our continued existence as a species. It’s getting late in the game with the finish line coming into sight. We need to get going — now.