Dust storms around the Grand Lake Salt

Publisher’s note: This article is published via The Great Salt Lake Collaborative, an initiative of journalism of solutions which is associated with news, education and media organizations to help inform people of the fate of the Grand Salt Lake.

Salt Lake City – The health risks associated with dust pollution continue to be interested in the Grand Salt Lake, and new research show that the youngest residents in UTAH can be the most vulnerable to its benefits.

Scientists have long since known that toxic heavy metals from natural sources and human activity, such as mining, exist in the bed of the exposed lake of the Grand Salt Lake, which dries and cripples when water retreats. After the storms, dust can swell in the cities along the Wasatch front.

Although previous research has mainly focused on what dust does to our lungs, it can also harm when it is also found in our stomachs, a study published last month in the journal Geohealth revealed.

“A large part of this dust ingestion is accessory,” said Annie Putman, a hydrologist of the US Geological Survey and the main study of the study. “He eats garden products with a dirty hand or eat it without washing it.”

Children under the age of six are the most at risk, according to research, as they tend to consume higher doses of dust and dirt compared to the size of their small body.

“I have a child who is nine months old, so I think about it all the time,” said Putman. “Babies … Constantly take things and explore them with the mouth.”

His research has revealed other problems for residents of all ages, including unhealthy metals mixed in northern Utah Dust. They can vary from community to community. And not all of them come from the Playa du Grand Salt Lake – current and past industrial activities such as mining, fusion and refining of fossil fuels also contribute to dust pollution.

---

It is important to do relevant sciences for people, so it is a major motivator for all of us who worked there.

–Annie Putman

---

Putman has created dust filters using round cake molds with glass beads hanging on a plastic mesh. She placed them on 17 sites in the counties of Davis, Weber, Box Elder and Cache.

“This is a kind of old methodology but very inexpensive to successfully capture the dust,” said Putman. “It’s great because you don’t need electricity. You have nothing special. You just defined the traps, you wait, you come back.”

She collected her samples at the end of the summer and in the fall of 2022, a particularly dry year which saw the great sink of Salt Lake at a low record altitude. She then sent the samples to the University of Utah to analyze the isotopes of the dust.

“By knowing the chemical composition,” said Diego Fernandez, a geology research teacher and geophysics in the United States and co-author of the newspaper, “we can separate the two main sources (from metals), those of the lake and those of human activities.”

Bountife, they found, had more pollution of the dust of human disturbance, such as gravel careers nearby. Communities in the north, however, have a higher exposure to Playa emissions.

The worrying contaminants identified in the study include arsenic, which can cause cancer and diabetes. It occurs naturally through the Grand Salt Lake Playa. During the millennia, streams and rivers rubbed the material of the mountains and rocks, depositing it in the sediments of the Terminal lake.

Scientists have also found lead, which mainly comes from human activities such as mining. It was also added to petrol and was part of the dust of the region both of vehicle and refineries near Farmington Bay. Lead can permanently modify the development of the brain and the nervous system, especially in children.

Metal has gathered in Playa sediments since the 19th century, as well as other pollutants in the heritage of state industrial activity.

More on the lake:

“Because we are in a closed basin,” said Putman, “a large part of what we do … has a chance to find ourselves in the lake.”

Part of the dust of its samples also contained dangerous thallium levels, a highly toxic element which can cause hair loss, gastrointestinal problems and premature birth when they are inhaled or ingested.

Putman’s previous research has revealed that the equipment could be linked to the Kennecott copper mine and the foundry in the county of Salt Lake.

But in her research published last month, she also found high levels of thallium near Ogden, several kilometers and a different section of the lake than Kennecott facilities.

In a report in 2023, she planned for the division of forestry, fires and state lands – which helped finance the study – putman applied that thallium can come from the Superfund Ogden Defense site, or Hot Springs nearby.

“This is a thread that we have not yet been able to fire,” said Putman. “There is potentially something interesting there.”

However, many Putman conclusions have confirmed the suspicions of scientists.

“I always thought it was the northeast area of ​​Farmington Bay which is most likely the hardest” of Great Salt Lake Dust, said Kevin Perry, professor of atmospheric studies in the United States who examined the study but who was not involved.

The area around the bay hungry with water has no air quality instructor managed by the state, said Perry. But Putman’s study revealed that the communities in the north and east of it saw the highest “flow” of the lake bed dust, or the rate of transport of particles.

“This confirms what the models have shown and what my intuition says essentially,” said Perry. “We must certainly put monitors in this area.”

Putman also noted that during the period when she collected samples, no meteorological event launched large dust storms. However, its cake pans trapped a lot of dust, indicating smaller and shorter dust events can fly under the radar of scientists.

“We have no idea of ​​their frequency,” said Perry. “(But) they have significant impacts on relatively small community areas.”

The UTAH environmental quality department is currently building a larger surveillance network to follow dust events through the state, which scientists have greeted.

Beyond taking precautions like staying inside during dust storms, Putman’s study recommends washing hands, toys and products, as well as removing shoes inside and the use of vacuum cleaners with HEPA filters, to reduce risks.

“It is important to do relevant sciences for people,” said Putman, “so it’s a major motivator for all of us who work there.”

His study also recommends an obvious but probably expensive solution to protect public health – preventing dust from blowing from the lake bed first.