Commonly Asked Questions About Utah’s Great Salt Lake and Ancient Lake Bonneville (PI-104)

By: Jim Davis, J. Wallace Gwynn, and Andrew Rupke

This second edition of Commonly Asked Questions about Great Salt Lake and Ancient Lake Bonneville follows more than a quarter-century after the first edition. When the original was published in 1996, Great Salt Lake was at levels above the historical average. The disruptions and memories of the floods of the 1980s were fresh in people’s minds. Since then, much of the character of the lake has changed. In October 2021, the lake reached its lowest surface elevation since records began in 1847. This 2021 low-level record was broken less than a year later in early July 2022. This second edition updates information on many of the answers to the commonly asked questions and presents a few new questions that were not pertinent to the lake decades ago but are asked today.

Other Information

Published: 2022
Pages: 21
Location: Utah