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A Terminal Case? Shrinking Inland Seas Expose Salty Particulates and More

2023; National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences; Volume: 131; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1289/ehp12835

1552-9924

Nate Seltenrich,

Soil erosion and sediment transport

Vol. 131, No. 6 FocusOpen AccessA Terminal Case? Shrinking Inland Seas Expose Salty Particulates and More Nate Seltenrich Nate Seltenrich Published:22 June 2023CID: 062001https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP12835AboutSectionsPDF ToolsDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InReddit AbstractThe headlines are alarming. Phrases like “environmental disaster,” “toxic nightmare,” “ecological collapse,” and “lost cause” have appeared in publications from the Palm Springs Desert Sun1 to the United Kingdom’s Guardian2 to describe the ongoing decline of the Salton Sea, California’s largest lake. Elsewhere in the American West, Utah’s shrinking Great Salt Lake has been likened to an “environmental nuclear bomb” by The New York Times,3 while other national publications have heralded its impending demise or warned of “toxic arsenic-laced dust.”4,5The Salton Sea and Great Salt Lake face distinct challenges and have different potential fixes. But together, they highlight a much broader trend that may pose public health threats in locations around the globe: dust blowing from the beds of drying terminal lakes.Surface water decrease has been observed in major saline lakes around the world in recent decades. Image: Courtesy of Hassani et al.,44 used under Creative Commons CC-BY license.Terminal lakes, also known as endorheic lakes, lack a perennial drain or outlet. Water flows in—through tributary streams carrying runoff or snowmelt—but not out. Usually located in arid or hot environments with limited rainfall and high evaporation rates, terminal lakes can undergo significant seasonal and annual fluctuations.6 However, anthropogenic disruptions typically pose a far greater threat: Diversions of greater amounts of water for human use, combined with climate-associated changes in precipitation and evaporation, place terminal lakes around the world in peril.7Prolonged shrinkage causes most of these lakes to become increasingly saline.8 Evaporation contributes to elevated concentrations of metals (from natural weathering and anthropogenic sources) and other compounds (such as pesticides from nearby fields) in the water and lake bed. Dust can blow from the dried bed, or playa, left behind, leading to a host of potential ecological and human health impacts.Soil conditions in the desiccated beds of shrinking saline lakes—including small particle size and a lack of vegetation—tend to be just right to make them outsize generators of particulate matter (PM), compared to other dry terrains, explains Cassandra Gaston, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami who studies global dust transport. “Even though these lakes are sort of small on a spatial scale, they can be very major dust emitters into the atmosphere,” she says.PM is known to be harmful when inhaled, particularly to the respiratory and cardiovascular symptoms,9 and is regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.10 But there is much to learn about the potential role of salts, metals, pesticides, microbes, and other agents that become part of the dust. Researchers are investigating factors that affect dust emissions, such as wind speed, soil moisture, and the presence or absence of a surface crust. As high-profile news stories make clear, these and other research projects are in a race against both climate change and humanity’s perennial thirst for water.Salton Sea, CaliforniaThe Salton Sea as we know it today was created by accident in 1905 when an irrigation canal from the Colorado River breached, flooding an arid low-lying basin called the Salton Sink. For thousands of years before that, a water body now called Lake Cahuilla cyclically formed and dried in the basin owing to natural flooding and course alterations of the Colorado.11,12 No longer hydrologically connected to the river, the sea’s 20th century incarnation survived on runoff from agricultural fields to its north and south.13Shrinkage of the Salton Sea, a popular vacation spot in the 20th century, has formed large expanses of playa. Images, left to right: © Valley Times Collection/Los Angeles Public Library (left); © JoeRoe/Shutterstock.com (right).In the 1950s and 1960s, vacationers flocked to this desert oasis, a few hours outside Los Angeles, to sunbathe, fish, and waterski in a unique setting with beautiful views of nearby mountains. But storm damage to popular marinas and resorts triggered a decline in recreation in the mid-1970s. Then, beginning in the 1980s, accumulating salts, pesticides, and fertilizers led to mass die-offs of fish, including stocked tilapia and croaker, and of migratory grebes and pelicans visiting the lake to feed.14,15 Climate change has accelerated the lake’s shrinkage by contributing to an extended drought across the western United States and increasing average temperatures, which promotes evaporation. Meanwhile, agricultural runoff has declined owing to stricter management of scarce Colorado River water, which also serves urban development in southwestern states.Today the Salton Sea is a fraction of its former size and one and a half times as salty as the Pacific Ocean.16 Its dust is carried from vast areas of exposed playa into communities nearby, especially south of the lake in the Imperial Valley. This region has California’s second-highest rates of pediatric hospitalizations and emergency department visits for asthma.17 Researchers are working to clarify how, exactly, Salton Sea dust may affect the respiratory health of the valley’s children18 and the rest of the approximately 180,000 residents,19 especially given the other sources of chronic air pollution in the region.20Jill Johnston, an associate professor of environmental health at the University of Southern California, sees dust generated by the drying lake as contributing to environmental injustice in this low-income, high-asthma corner of the state. “You have not only the Salton Sea but all the agricultural industry that’s down there, both field work and a lot of factories that support manufacturing of various things for that industry,” Johnston says. “There is a lack of easy access to primary care, so that may be driving some of the higher rates of hospitalization. It’s on a route to the Mexican border, so there’s a fair amount of diesel truck traffic. There’s also a lot of diesel equipment used in the agricultural industry, and there’s agricultural burning.”In California’s Imperial Valley, which straddles a busy crossing point on the U.S.–Mexico border, dust from the Salton Sea combines with pollutants from many other sources. For example, customs checkpoints in the sister cities of Mexicali (Mexico) and Calexico (California) receive a large amount of diesel traffic. Mexicali (top right) is a major manufacturing center, with factories called maquiladoras lining the border. Extensive agriculture in the valley can also result in harmful emissions from farm equipment, fieldwork, and controlled burning. Images, clockwise from top left: © iStock/JannHuizenga; © Jay Calderon and Richard Lui/USA TODAY NETWORK; © iStock/JamesBrey; © iStock/YarOman.Johnston’s work aims to tease apart some of these intertwining factors and better understand the role of lake dust on children’s respiratory health in the Imperial Valley. Her latest research compares data from PM monitors at five local elementary schools with student survey responses and physiological measurements. She says the work was delayed by COVID-19, but should be published in summer 2023.Not far away at the University of California, Riverside, professor of biomedical sciences David Lo is taking a closer look at the dust itself, given concerns that accumulated metals, pesticides, and other components may pose an elevated health risk. Sure enough, two recent laboratory studies he led supported the notion that the unique characteristics of Salton Sea dust may drive certain health impacts for those who breathe it.In the first study,21 published in October 2021, Lo and his team observed a unique inflammatory response in mice exposed for 7 days to aerosolized Salton Sea water. That response was absent in control mice exposed to Pacific Ocean aerosols. In the second study,22 published in January 2023, Lo’s team exposed mice to aqueous extracts of dust from both the Salton Sea and the nearby desert. They discovered that the lake dust caused distinct inflammatory responses similar to those elicited by well-known innate immune triggers derived from bacteria. As a result, the authors postulated there may be pro-inflammatory microbial components entrained in the playa dust that are “likely to worsen the pulmonary health of already vulnerable nearby communities.”22Lo explains, “When we collected dust near the Salton Sea and then did exposures in our chamber studies, the mice had pretty impressive lung inflammatory responses. When we collected dust from farther away, we didn’t see any effect at all. So our findings support the idea that what’s in the dust matters at least as much as just breathing dust.”Utah’s Great Salt LakeSimilar questions are being asked about Utah’s Great Salt Lake. Water levels have been declining for decades23 because of diversions from freshwater streams that feed the lake, compounded by recent changes in precipitation.24 Approximately 73% of the lake’s historic (prediversion) volume and 60% of its surface area are already lost, with corresponding expansion of the playa.24Dust blowing from the playa of the Great Salt Lake may reach large populations in the Salt Lake City–Ogden metropolitan area. Image: © Charles E Uibel/Shutterstock.com.A shallow remnant of Lake Bonneville, which covered much of western Utah about 20,000 years ago,25 the Great Salt Lake reached an all-time low in the summer of 2022 and threatens to drop even farther in 2023.26 Salinity varies across the lake but reaches as high as ten times the average ocean salinity,27 approaching a threshold that could lead to cascading ecological impacts.28,29 If microorganisms at the base of the food chain can no longer survive, neither can the brine shrimp and brine flies that feed on them, nor the migratory waterfowl and shorebirds—phalaropes, grebes, and others—that rely on the shrimp and flies.The presence of arsenic in the expanding lake bed from both natural sources and human activity3,30,31 has led to widespread concern that residents of Salt Lake City and nearby communities may be breathing harmful levels of this highly toxic metalloid. However, University of Utah professor of atmospheric science Kevin Perry—who is widely known for riding a bike across the entire 800 square miles (1287.5 km) of exposed lake bed between 2016 and 2018, collecting soil samples32—believes that worries over arsenic exposures, fueled in part by media coverage, are thus far unfounded. And he thinks the arsenic question may distract from the larger issue: namely, that intentional water diversions are hurting the lake and contributing to the release of unhealthy levels of PM.“We know there are high concentrations of arsenic in the soil, we presume that it is being delivered to the surrounding communities, but we don’t really have measurements to prove that yet,” he explains. “We don’t even know yet whether or not the arsenic that’s in the soil is bioavailable, that it can interact with your body.” Moreover, he continues, high PM levels are inherently hazardous to human health, regardless of the composition of the dust. “We see plumes coming off the Great Salt Lake in concentrations that exceed the federal standards for short periods of time,” he says.The Utah Department of Environmental Quality agrees that high PM exposures are a problem and “currently issues high-wind warnings in the event of high levels of dust so people can take action and go indoors,” the agency said in a statement to Environmental Health Perspectives. The department also echoes Perry’s uncertainty about the makeup of the dust: “There has been a lot of concern regarding arsenic from the lake bed, and we do know that lifetime exposure to arsenic is a real concern, but there is not an acute risk that we are currently aware of. There is not currently an air quality standard for arsenic, but there are studies occurring to understand the impact it may have on public health.”Hydrologist Annie Putman, with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), is studying the characteristics and dispersion of dust from the Great Salt Lake playa. Putman was lead author of a study published in October 202233 analyzing dust deposited in 18 passive samplers positioned along the shore, within Salt Lake City, and in other cities on the southern and eastern edges of the lake. Samplers located closest to the playa accumulated the greatest amount of PM over the course of the 14-month study, confirming that the playa is indeed a major source of dust. But chemical signatures of dust captured within communities to the south and east of the lake suggested origins from local soils, not the playa.Putman and her collaborators—including Daniel Mendoza, another University of Utah researcher and lake expert; and two USGS scientists, Molly Blakowski and Daniel Jones—are now working on a follow-up study, the results of which they hope to present to the state this summer. Their research targets the north side of the lake, where Putman says she expects to see a greater impact of playa dust, given that prevailing winds often blow from south to north.As in their previous study, the researchers are using passive samplers that gradually accumulate dust but reveal nothing about the rate of delivery. “What we can see is which monitor had the most delivered to it over the sampling period,” Putman explains. The study team will also analyze captured PM for chemical signatures of Great Salt Lake dust and markers of anthropogenic sources, such as agriculture and industry. To help assess the levels of potentially harmful compounds entrained in lake dust, the team will also measure metals derived from mining activities, coal burning, agricultural runoff, and local geology; these metals include lead, copper, thallium, nickel, and more.33“The lake dust is part of the big picture of air quality pressures in the region, so one of our main questions is to what degree different communities are being exposed to playa dust specifically,” Putman says. “But we are also asking, layered within that, what else folks are being exposed to during these dust events.”Climate Change and Water Diversion GloballyThe Salton Sea and Great Salt Lake are just two of many drying terminal lakes around the world that are producing more and more dust as they shrink, and even dry up.7 The Aral Sea—bordered by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and once the fourth-largest lake on the planet34—has lost approximately 90% of its volume to water diversions that began in the 1960s to irrigate cotton and other crops.35 Studies over the last two decades have linked dust emissions from its lake bed to reduced kidney and lung function among those living nearby.36,37In Iran, increased water diversions, higher temperatures, and lower precipitation have led to dramatic drops in Lake Urmia in recent decades, according to a new study.38 The authors explain that salty dust from Lake Urmia’s expanding lake bed regularly blows into neighboring communities. They report a notable increase in the prevalence of hypertension among residents of an adjoining county north and east of the lake—from 2.09% in 2012 to 16.05% in 2020—in association with lake drying.Once the sixth-largest salt lake in the world, Lake Urmia covered nearly half a million hectares in 1989 (top) but shrank to around 62,000 hectares by 2014 (bottom). Climate data from satellites and other sources demonstrate that the lake is shrinking even in wet years.58 Researchers attribute the shrinkage to the region’s increasing agriculture and development. Images: Courtesy of Goddard Space Flight Center, National Aeronautics and Space Administration.Then there is the ecological and humanitarian crisis of Lake Chad in central Africa, which has shrunk 90% over the last 60 years as a result of both climate factors and diversions.39 The lake itself is a remnant of the ancient Lake Mega-Chad, which began drying thousands of years ago owing to natural climatic shifts.40 Three hundred miles (483 km) to the northeast of the current Lake Chad is a frightening vision of what it could one day become: the Bodélé Depression on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, once also covered by Lake Mega-Chad and today considered one of the largest sources of dust on the planet.41Still other terminal lakes are at risk: the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest inland body of water, straddling the border between Europe and Asia42; Lake Poopó in Bolivia, recently dried and likely never to recover43; and more in China, Australia, and elsewhere.7Nima Shokri, a professor of geo-hydroinformatics at Germany’s Hamburg University of Technology, is among those taking a global perspective on terminal lakes, with an eye toward predicting and preventing future disasters. Shokri served as senior author of a 2020 paper that addressed the “desiccation crisis” of saline lakes by proposing a novel decision-making framework for building climate resilience, with Lake Urmia as a case study.44 The approach accounts for a wide range of climatic, hydrologic, and agronomic stressors and is designed to identify optimal land-use strategies, restoration projects, water allocations, and other solutions. At Lake Urmia, for example, the authors recommend the southern arm of the lake be prioritized for restoration over other portions, based upon projected soil moisture and dust emission data.The issue requires global action and cooperation not only because climate change and water diversions are nearly universal threats, Shokri points out, but also because dust can cross state and national boundaries, even oceans. “I think this is one of the most serious threats we will be dealing with in the 21st century,” he says. “The adverse consequence of the transport of this dust is felt not only by the people living in that region, but also by people living thousands of kilometers away.”His current research combines sophisticated modeling with the latest climate science to better forecast and proactively address major global dust sources, including drying saline lakes. Shokri and his collaborators are training new computational models on high-resolution climate and environmental data, he says, with a goal of “extending the predictive and qualitative capabilities that are required to understand and hopefully mitigate the consequences of this kind of environmental disaster.”Adam Abdullah, then aged 75, near Melea, at the edge of the rapidly diminishing Lake Chad. “There used to be water all around here, but I have watched it disappear,” he told U.K. Telegraph reporter Joe Schute in 2019.59 Lake Chad has shrunk by 90% in recent decades, owing to climate change exacerbated by population growth and irrigation. The Great Green Wall project of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification aims to restore degraded land and bring security to one of the most impoverished regions on earth.60 Image: © Simon Townsley/Panos Pictures.Approaches to MitigationExactly what such prevention may look like varies from lake to lake. At the Salton Sea, for example, the challenge is to make do with less agricultural runoff now that local growers are being asked to conserve water.16,45 To meet that challenge, the California Natural Resources Agency, Department of Water Resources, and Department of Fish and Wildlife are working with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation on the Salton Sea Management Program. This 10-year plan calls for construction of 30,000 acres (12,141 hectares) of dust-suppression projects and wildlife-friendly wetlands.46,47A longer-term vision—potentially including water imported from other sources—is being developed. For some in the state, this heavily managed approach may call to mind the intensive ongoing efforts required to reduce dust emissions from dry Owens Lake 200 miles (322 km) to the north, which had already cost Los Angeles Department of Water and Power ratepayers more than $2.5 billion in 2022.48 The contemporary Salton Sea was never exactly natural, and to avoid further harm to human health and local ecology, its future will be even more artificial.The opposite is true at the Great Salt Lake, where Perry believes the solution is straightforward: reduce water diversions from rivers feeding the lake to allow it refill, the way it always has. The lake is currently down 17 feet (5 m) from its 150-year average, Perry says, and a 2016 study estimated that 11 feet (3 m) of this can be attributed to water diversions for consumptive uses.49Workers with the Salton Sea Management Program add water to the bucket irrigation system at a vegetation enhancement project. Approximately 1,700 acres (688 hectares) are being planted with native species including iodine bush, big saltbush, salt grass, honey mesquite, and palo verde. Hay bales protect the young plants and provide some dust suppression until the vegetation is established.60 Image: Courtesy of Salton Sea Management Program.Perry sees this finding as cause for hope, not despair. “The reason I’m optimistic is that we didn’t get here by external forces,” he says. “We got here by choices that we made with how we use our water, and if we value the lake, we can alter that narrative and alter how we use water so that we can save the lake. It’s within our power to do it; we just have to make the decisions and move in that direction.”What is more, notes Perry, “The Great Salt Lake has the potential to be neutral with regards to climate change, with a little more precipitation and a little more evaporation.50 So we do have a chance to return it back to its natural state, where it shrinks and expands with the snowpack.”Recent infusions of federal money may lead toward other solutions and dust-mitigation strategies at these and other lakes throughout the U.S. West. In 2020, the National Science Foundation awarded a 5-year, $5.2 million research grant to five Utah institutions for a collaborative effort called Dust Squared.51–56 In December 2022, Congress authorized a $25 million grant to the USGS to study water use and demand, climatic stressors, dust production, ecological impacts, and more across the western United States.57“We’re trying to understand dust in its totality,” says Perry, whose own research under the Dust Squared grant will include investigating the role of surface crusts in reducing erosion. Other investigators will look at interactions between lake dust and other air pollutants, chemical fingerprinting to identify dust sources, and impacts of lake dust on snowmelt, water quality, and soil production.Echoing Perry’s call for action, the University of Miami’s Cassandra Gaston believes that all the increased attention on imperiled terminal lakes from researchers, government agencies, the media, and the public can contribute to their preservation by inspiring informed voting and other political actions. “The alternative [to action] is to look at these problems as so overwhelming and complex that we’re kind of paralyzed,” she says. “And that’s not going to get us anywhere.”Nate Seltenrich covers science and the environment from the San Francisco Bay Area. His work on subjects including energy, ecology, and environmental health has appeared in a wide variety of regional, national, and international publications.References1. Desert Sun. 2023. California’s Dying Sea. 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