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In the summer of 2022, the Great Salt Lake was at a distressingly low record-breaking elevation.

Researchers traced the records back to 1850, and they saw the lake had lost nearly three

quarters of its water, 60 percent of its surface area, and its ecosystem had begun to

collapse. Now, most scientists seem to agree that climate change was only a secondary contributor to the decline of the lake.

The real culprit, they believed, was human consumption, unsustainable water use and excessive diversions of the lake's tributaries.

In other words, the problem wasn't out of anyone's hands. Something could be done to save the lake's tributaries. In other words, the problem wasn't out of anyone's hands. Something could

be done to save the lake. And with that in mind, in the weeks before the opening of the

23 legislative session, a group of advocates and scientists signed on to a report published by

Brigham Young University. It wasn't a scientific paper in the formal sense.

It hadn't been peer-reviewed or published in a journal.

In fact, they described it as a briefing for lawmakers.

But whatever you call it, here's the part that caught most everyone's attention.

It said the lake's drop had been accelerating since 2020, an average deficit every year of 1.2 million acre feet. And if you follow that trend line, the lake runs out of water in five years. Here's how they put it in the report. If this loss rate continues, the lake as we know it, is on track to

disappear in five years. Five years. The possible fate of the lake was no longer abstract.

Scientists had done the equations and come up with a possible timeline that was terrifying.

The journalist and climate scientist Matthew Laplante was working on his PhD at Utah State

when he first read about the report.

And my phone started lighting up, and it was a bunch of other graduate students.

You know that emoji with the rolling eyes?

It was a lot of that.

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