(Spenser Heaps | Deseret News) Birds are pictured in a part of the Owens Lake Dust Mitigation Program that has been converted to a shallow flood area on the otherwise dry lakebed in Inyo County, Calif., on Thursday, Aug. Geological Survey Utah Water Science Center in Salt Lake City. These lakes like the Great Salt Lake, Pyramid Lake and Walker Lake are part of a system of enclosed basins, said David O’Leary, a hydrologist with the U.S. The saline lakes of the Great Basin are remnants of the ice age and are echoes of Lake Bonneville and Lake Lahontan, another large endorheic Pleistocene lake that covered modern northwestern Nevada and extended into northeastern California and southern Oregon. When the rivers start to dry up or are diverted, the lakes’ levels of salinity increase. These saline lakes in the Great Basin are terminal, meaning they are fed by rivers and are a hydrologic endpoint. “These lakes are relics of the past, and they hold a lot of answers to the way Mother Earth changes,” said Kyle Roerink, executive director of the Great Basin Water Network, “and I think we need to use them as a barometer about the future - where we have been and where we are now.”
It has lost close to half its volume, and more than 800 square miles of lakebed are now exposed, vulnerable to wind-whipped storms that spread toxic dust along the Wasatch Front.
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