WOODS CROSS, Utah — Utah's Department of Natural Resources is utilizing LiDAR technology to help map the Great Salt Lake.
"It is a topo-bathymetric LiDAR sensor that operates by basically recording the distance from the aircraft to the ground. It uses a green wave length... but that allows us to get through the water column and actually penetrate the water and get to the bottom this," said Josh Novak with Dewberry, which is working with the data gathered from teh project.
Such an effort has never really been tried before on the Great Salt Lake and the Department of Natural Resources said if the project is successful, it could help other saline lakes across the country.
"What we noticed as the lake dropped to historic lows in the fall of 2021, and then again in the fall of 2022, was that the current bathymetric data that we have for the lake really didn't match reality," said Michael Vandenberg with the Utah Geological Survey.
What it can do, Vandenberg said, is provide better data on the topography of the lake and the volume of water in it. That can help make better decisions about managing the lake as it continues to face declines. It has also led to some new discoveries.
For example, they identified mounds on the bottom of the lake that are several feet tall and several feet in diameter that nobody had seen before.
"So we can now like kind of hypothesize what might have created those mounds. We think maybe it's groundwater coming up," Vandenberg said. Groundwater is a huge part of the Great Salt Lake story, so finding this direct evidence for groundwater coming up into the lake bed is really important."
This article is published through the Great Salt Lake Collaborative, a solutions journalism initiative that partners news, education and media organizations to help inform people about the plight of the Great Salt Lake—and what can be done to make a difference before it is too late. Read all of our stories at greatsaltlakenews.org.
