The world's salt lakes are drying up, but solutions are hard to come by

"Over time, the water evaporated to form the smaller, brinier Owens Lake. Indigenous Paiute people call the Owens Valley Payahuunadü, 'the land of the flowing water'. Today, Owens Lake is a 'Dusty Vestige of the Old West', as NASA described a photograph of the lake taken from space."

"The valley's waters were drained by an aqueduct, completed in 1913, to supply the growing city of Los Angeles. The basin is encrusted with salts - borax, potash, potassium and yellowish crystal trona - that are stained pink by salt-loving microorganisms called archaea. Until about 2013, Owens Lake was also one of the largest sources of dust in the United States, releasing roughly 70,000 tonnes of particles each year."

"That pool, she writes, is part of a system of pipes and water-spouting 'bubblers' mandated by a 1997 court ruling to dampen down the dust clouds. The moisture enables algae and brine flies to flourish, attracting birds such as red-eyed eared grebes, tiny least sandpipers, wading avocets and California gulls."

Owens Lake in California's Sierra Nevada region evolved over 11,000 years from a massive 500-square-kilometre freshwater lake fed by melting glaciers into a smaller, saline body of water. The 1913 completion of an aqueduct diverting water to Los Angeles transformed the lake into a dust-producing environmental hazard. The exposed basin accumulated toxic salts including borax, potash, and trona, colored pink by salt-loving archaea. Until 2013, the lake generated approximately 70,000 tonnes of dust annually containing hazardous substances like arsenic and cadmium from historical mining. A 1997 court ruling mandated a water management system using pipes and bubblers to suppress dust, which inadvertently created conditions supporting algae, brine flies, and migratory bird populations.

Read at Nature