Namesake
Special | 6m 13sVideo has Closed Captions
Great Salt Lake is in crisis. Biologist Bonnie Baxter keeps watch.
Water levels in Great Salt Lake have shrunk to record lows. The biologist Bonnie Baxter says we’re seeing an ecosystem collapse before our eyes—as microbialites are beached, brine flies and shrimp die off, and birds migrate elsewhere. Toxic dust released from the dry lakebed endangers people, too. Meanwhile Bonnie studies the lake and tracks its decline. Produced by RadioWest Films.
RadioWest Films on PBS Utah is a local public television program presented by PBS Utah
Namesake
Special | 6m 13sVideo has Closed Captions
Water levels in Great Salt Lake have shrunk to record lows. The biologist Bonnie Baxter says we’re seeing an ecosystem collapse before our eyes—as microbialites are beached, brine flies and shrimp die off, and birds migrate elsewhere. Toxic dust released from the dry lakebed endangers people, too. Meanwhile Bonnie studies the lake and tracks its decline. Produced by RadioWest Films.
How to Watch RadioWest Films on PBS Utah
RadioWest Films on PBS Utah is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
Bonnie Baxter: I'm out there on average about once a week and it's an entirely different landscape.
The water is evaporating and disappearing at a rate that is visible over days because the leak is so shallow a foot of elevation decrease is something that's visible in miles.
We're - I used to just get out of my car and grab a shore sample.
Now you literally need to walk a mile to the waterline, two miles in some cases.
In White Rock Bay, the white rock that used to poke out of the water is now something you walk to, Egg Island and Bridger bay around Antelope Island is also something you walk to.
The smell that lofts into the city when we get those winds that come just right over the lake actually is biology and it's a sign of a really vibrant saline ecosystem.
Now when I go to some of the beaches on the island that I sample often I don't smell that.
These microbialites that I study have been beached.
They're no longer in the water There are no brine flies flying around my feet.
The gulls that usually are running around the shore eating the brine flies are floating out in the deep water hoping one of the pupa will release a brine fly so they can eat one.
They're like tombstones out there.
It's otherworldly.
It'’’s silent.
it's just different.
For a moment I'm measuring salinity, which has gone crazy high, and I'm analyzing water samples, and I'm trying to scrape some mats off one of these microbialites and I'm busy doing my science and then another moment I just stop and cry.
We're seeing this system crash before our eyes.
I don't know any other way to say it.
RadioWest Films on PBS Utah is a local public television program presented by PBS Utah