![]() 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. The overall footprint has shrunk to about half of its peak size in 1994. It’s thinned by roughly one-third in the last 60 years. As nearby groundwater replaces the mineral-rich brine, evaporation yields less salt than historic cycles of flooding and evaporation left on the landscape. Research has time and again shown that the briny water in the aquifer below the flats is depleting faster than nature can replenish it. The glistening white terrain of the Bonneville Salt Flats, a remnant of a prehistoric lakebed that is one of the American West’s many other-worldly landscapes, serves as a racetrack for land speed world records and backdrop for movies like “Independence Day” and “The World’s Fastest Indian.”īut it’s growing thinner and thinner as those who cherish it clamor for changes to save it. It’s so flat that on certain days, visitors swear they can see the curvature of the earth. Meaning, more water coming from the Silver Island Mountains.In the Utah desert, a treeless expanse of pristine white salt crystals has long lured daredevil speed racers, filmmakers and social media-obsessed tourists. Keach believes that groundwater is the key to increasing the size of the Bonneville Salt Flats. “They’ve been doing this historically for a long time.” “You can go into Google Earth and look, in an ad hoc way, and look at the last thirty years, or forty years of imagery across the salt flat … and you see the salt flat expand and contract,” Keach said. The idea is to add more water to the surface, which leads to evaporation, and more salt “growing.”īut Keach said a more scientific approach is needed that directs how much water to lay down, and when to lay it down. Keach said that projects have been proposed that would manually pump salt water from beneath the flats to the surface of the flats. Reversing the shrinking Bonneville Salt Flats? So how are the two related? As the Great Salt Lake decreases, and the thickness of the flats decreases, the racing distance gets shorter. And the surface, which isn’t 100% dry, keeps tire temperatures down at high speeds. ![]()
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