As the Great Salt Lake in Utah continues to dry up, the arts community there has mobilized to lay bare the major ecological, economic, and health stakes if the decline continues.

Some have called this an environmental nuclear bomb of toxic dust, harming people and industries that rely on the lake.

A public arts project called Wake the Great Salt Lake aims to educate

and inspire residents and visitors alike. Our senior arts correspondent, Jeffrey Brown,

took a look for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

So that's Antelope Island out there. You see that?

A summer day at the Great Salt Lake, a natural wonder with prehistoric roots, long

and idyllic place to observe wildlife, attracting locals and visitors from all over.

But in recent years, the largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere has been ailing.

We're on the precipice.

You're very, very close to an ecosystem that is collapsing.

Biologist Bonnie Baxter is director of the Great Salt Lake Institute

at Westminster University in Salt Lake City.

She says excessive water diversion for agriculture in cities and a long-term megadrought exacerbated by climate change and reduced precipitation have created a crisis, in which public health is being threatened by toxic dust from the flat-dry lakebed or playa, containing arsenic and other heavy metals.

We're next to a Metropolitan Center and the public health dangers of breathing this

playa dust is terrible.

So as we expose these shorelines, the dust can become airborne and really impact the air quality.

And the ecosystem hangs in the balance.

We've worked to balance the salinity to help the life and the lake that feeds all over the birds survive.

Ten million birds depend on this ecosystem.

It's so important that it's probably the most important body of water on the whole Pacific

flyway.

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