In December 2024, a team of researchers and activists released a startling report: excessive water usage and megadrought are slowly killing the Great Salt Lake.
And if no one intervenes, wrote lead author Ben Abbott, then the lake will completely “disappear in the next five years.”
“It is our responsibility as people who study the lake to tell the public,” said microbiologist Bonnie Baxter, a co-author of the report, in an interview with UPR.
“It would not be ethical for us to not disclose that we were seeing that crisis in real time.”
As scientists raised alarm bells about the disappearing lake, Utah Governor Spencer Cox noted heightened concern from the community as locals realized how dire the crisis had become.
“Now that people are realizing there's a potential that it might not always be here, that's gotten people's attention in a positive way,” Cox told NPR in 2024.
As the researchers noted in their report, one of the biggest threats to the Great Salt Lake is excessive water diversion.
For decades, a significant portion of water that would naturally flow into the Great Salt Lake has been diverted for agricultural purposes — particularly for growing crops like hay and alfalfa to feed the state’s beef and dairy production.
In fact, it takes a whopping 450,000 gallons to produce a single ton of alfalfa — which is nearly as much water as two Utah homes typically use in a year.
“The key question is how do we save the Great Salt Lake?” one Farm Bureau official told the Great Salt Lake Collaborative. “And all the darts and arrows point back to agriculture.”
That’s the same conclusion that 14-year-old Sophia Zhang came to when she was dreaming up ways to save her shrinking lake.
The Utah native wants to pursue a degree in minerals science, but she’s already put her brain to the test with a landmark project: seeing if biodegradable hydrogels could effectively be used to conserve water in irrigation systems.
“Plagued by excessive water use compounded by climate warming, the Lake had precipitously declined since the 1990s and hit historic lows for two consecutive years in 2021 and 2022,” Zhang said in her video proposal for Society for Science — a nonprofit that hosts global science competitions for students.
Fundamentally, Zhang explained, the Great Salt Lake crisis comes down to a problem with “water management.”
“Hydrogels — or 3-D polymer networks capable of slowing and absorbing large amounts of water — provide a promising measure to reduce water evaporation and runoff, while slowly releasing water to soil,” said Zhang.
To test her hypothesis, Zhang made three types of hydrogels out of starch, agar, and hydroxyethyl cellulose (HEC).
Her HEC-based gel performed best at a range of temperatures, but all of her gels helped the soils retain water.
Her favorite part of the project was making and sampling the hydrogels and seeing the “Jello-like substance” appear before her eyes.
“I realized how obsessed I am with getting my hands dirty and wet in the experimental process,” she told Science News Explores. “It was just like cooking.”
In the past few years, hydrogels have been slowly integrated into farming practices but the process is still very new.
Zhang’s project adds further evidence for the burgeoning farming technique while utilizing soil samples in her own backyard — with the Great Salt Lake as her muse.
Her project may not singlehandedly save her lake, but it does highlight a pathway forward.
Due to the success of her project, Zhang won second place in the Technology category for the 2024 Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge.
But her passion for water conservation doesn’t start and stop with her hydrogel project. The eighth grader has also interviewed scientists and government officials on a local and national level and recently spoke about the water crisis at the United Nations.
This month, when asked if she had any advice for any “science fair newbies,” Zhang said: “Curiously observe, carefully think, and courageously act.”
“Exploring the frontier of the unknown is risky. Sometimes we get lost. Sometimes we have to go back to zero,” she continued. “I encountered a few roadblocks in my research, but overcoming [those] roadblocks is also the most rewarding.”
Header image via Brigitte Werner / Wikimedia Commons
