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Climate scientists from Brigham Young University recently warned that if emergency measures are not enacted immediately, Utah’s Great Salt Lake could disappear by 2028. The entropic conditions of human-induced climate change and drought are tipping the region into a desiccated dead zone. In Spiraling, I chart the environmental crisis point that the imperiled Lake is rapidly approaching.

Few lakes rival the Great Salt Lake in size and significance — it is the largest saline lake in the United States and the eighth largest in the world. However, drought conditions caused by regional climate change and industrial development have caused the Lake to decrease in scale by more than two-thirds in the past forty years. The surface area of the Lake has declined from 3,330 square miles in 1980 to a record-low 950 square miles in 2021.

In addition, because the Great Salt Lake is a terminal lake (meaning it has no natural outlets), over the past century it has become a repository of arsenic, dioxins, mercury, PCBs, and other toxins from the mining industry as well as from agricultural runoff. As more of the lakebed becomes exposed due to the Lake’s depletion, the surrounding atmosphere will become increasingly poisoned by toxic airborne dust emanating from the playa.

As Terry Tempest Williams has written: “On any given day, dust devils are whipping up a storm in these hot spots, blowing mercury- and arsenic-laced winds through the Wasatch Front, where 2.6 million people dwell, with Salt Lake City at its center. Arsenic levels in the lakebed are already far higher than the Environmental Protection Agency’s recommendation for safety. And with the state’s population projected to increase to 5.5 million people by 2060, the urgency to reverse the lake’s retreat will only grow.”

I have been working in the vicinity of the Great Salt Lake for nearly forty years. Spiraling is my latest chapter responding to this environmental disaster, which is unfolding with increasing urgency. I was drawn to the region by the Kennecott Copper Mine and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty; I made aerial photographs of the massive open pit copper mine as part of my Black Maps series in 1988 and photographed the Spiral Jetty as part of my Terminal Mirage series in 2003.

A measure of the Lake’s disappearance can be gauged by Spiral Jetty, which was constructed on the shoreline of the Lake in 1970. In the era of Terminal Mirage, the Jetty appears as a ghostly white form – as the waters of the Lake began to shift into a drought condition, the Jetty reemerged covered with salt crystals from decades of submersion beneath the briny water. In its critical drought condition shown in Spiraling, the water levels in the Lake have receded hundreds of feet from the artwork, leaving it completely exposed, stranded from the shoreline hundreds of feet away. It stands as a symbol of the Lake’s impending demise.

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