MARCELLE SHOOP FIRST SAW the Great Salt Lake in the early 1980s. Thanks to a period of above-average precipitation, water filled the basin to the brim, lapping at the interstate’s edge as she traveled past.
Today that view has dramatically changed. Utah’s famed saline lake and wetlands are disappearing as farms and communities divert the rivers that flow into the basin. Its surface elevation naturally fluctuates but has trended downward for decades. In 2021 the lake’s southern end hit a