Search for solutions drives race to save Utah salt flats
WENDOVER, Utah — In the Utah desert, a treeless expanse of pristine white salt crystals has long lured daredevil speed racers, filmmakers and social media-obsessed tourists. It’s so flat that on certain days, visitors swear they can see the curvature of the earth.
The glistening white terrain of the Bonneville Salt Flats, a remnant of a prehistoric lake bed, serves as a racetrack for land speed world records and backdrop for movies like “Independence Day” and “The World’s Fastest Indian.”
But it’s growing thinner and thinner as those who cherish it clamor for changes to save it.
Research has shown that the briny water in the aquifer below the flats is depleting faster than nature can replenish it. As nearby groundwater replaces the mineral-rich brine, evaporation yields less salt than historic cycles of flooding and evaporation left on the landscape.
It’s thinned by roughly a third in the last 60 years. The overall footprint has shrunk to about half of its peak size in 1994. The crust keeps tires cool at high speeds and provides an ideal surface for racing — unless seasonal flooding fails to recede or leaves behind an unstable layer of salt. Racers struggle to find a track long enough to reach record speeds with only 8 miles of track compared 13 miles several decades ago.
Scientists largely agree that years of aquifer overdraws by potash mining have driven the problem, yet insist that there’s no hard evidence that simply paying the mining company to return water to the area will solve it amid detrimental human activity like extracting
minerals or driving race cars.
Potash is potassium-based salt primarily used throughout the world as a fertilizer for crops such as corn, soy, rice and wheat. It’s extracted in more than a dozen countries throughout the world, mainly from prehistoric lake beds like Bonneville’s.
In Utah, after three decades of studies examining the salt flats, nothing has slowed the deterioration. But officials are funding a new study as they try to find a solution. Researchers are seeking to pinpoint why the salt is fading and what can be done to stop it.
Under a $1 million research project spearheaded by the Utah Geological Survey, scientists are gathering data to understand the effects climate change, racing, repaving the salt and operating the mine on leased federal land have on preserving the Salt Flats.
The salt is thinning as climate change drags the West into its third decade of drought, yet it’s unclear how that affects the seasonal
flood patterns the landscape relies on to maintain its size and footprint.
Frustration is boiling over for Dennis Sullivan, a car-builder and racer who set a land speed record in his 1927 Model T street roadster. His organization, the Salt Flats Racing Association, is convinced the potash mining company is the primary reason that the aquifer is being depleted. But rather than point fingers in that direction, he and other racers blame the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the area and is required by federal law to balance multiple uses and preserve it now and into the future.
To save the landscape, Mr. Sullivan says, the U.S. government needs to find $50 million over 10 years to pay Intrepid Potash, the mining company, to pour briny water it’s drawn from the land back on to the flats.
“In the world I came from, you study something, you figure out what changes you need to make, you make the changes and then you go back and study it again to see if your changes had an effect on it,” said Mr. Sullivan. “It’s ludicrous to just keep studying it until you do something.”
Mr. Sullivan doesn’t blame Intrepid Potash; it has a leasing agreement with the federal government. He says land managers haven’t invested in preserving the landscape or replenishing the salt taken off of it.
Intrepid Potash did not respond to questions from The Associated Press.
Jeremiah Bernau, a geologist working on the study with the Utah Geological Survey, said the mining company has already been pouring salt and it’s unclear if that’s the answer.
“Every use is going to have some sort of impact upon it. It’s just trying to rank those, understand how much that impact is and what we can do to mitigate or understand it,” Mr. Bernau said on a recent tour of the area.
“My work is trying to understand how is that working and what are the actions that we can do in terms of helping to preserve this landscape,” he said.
Backers of the study currently underway hope the federal government will consider returning more salt in order to preempt conflict and allow the racers and miners to continue as they have been.
If the study shows salt laydown is effective, Utah state geologist Bill Keach said he expects racers will use the information to push for federal funding to keep up the project.
In 2019, when lawmakers approved the initiative, they allocated $5 million, on the condition that the federal government would also provide funding, to return the briny water needed to preserve the salt crust.
Rep. Steve Handy, a Republican who spearheaded the effort, said the racers’ lobbyists initially suggested the federal government would meet Utah’s investment with an additional $45 million, giving the program the $50 million that Mr. Sullivan and other racers say is needed to maintainthe status quo.