TOOELE COUNTY, Utah — For many people like Dennis Sullivan, president of the Utah Salt Flats Racing Association, the Bonneville Salt Flats are of another world.
"When you're going on an access road in the morning and that sun's coming up, you think: 'It's the second coming of God.' It is so gorgeous,” Sullivan said.
Located 120 miles west of Salt Lake City, the 12-by-5 mile terrain of white salt crystals is home to the Bonneville Speedway, an international racetrack for land speed world records.
It’s been the backdrop for films and Instagram photos. It’s also a mining location for Potash — a potassium-based salt primarily used around the world as a crop fertilizer.
“It's such a unique place to have a salt pan like this, that you can come out and study and understand the roles of groundwater, and how salt grows or doesn't grow,” said Bill Keach, director of the Utah Geological Survey.
For racers, it’s a special kind of track.
“Why did they come to the salt flats to race? You know why? One of the reasons we get a flat. Another one is that the salt keeps your tires cool,” Keach said.
And while the famous tourist attraction has the essence of being so still and pristine, there are a lot of changes happening.
“It’s not as long as it used to be,” Keach said. “So that's the complaint.”
The salt flats have also thinned by about a third over the last 60 years.
Scientists believe its decline could be drought-related, due to industrial and human activity, nature’s natural course or even all of the above.
In the 1990s, Reilly Industries, the then-owners of the potash mining operation with the Bureau of Land Management, tried to refresh the salt through a project called the Laydown program. They pumped water and leftover salts from the mine and laid it onto the flats to help them expand.
“There's a NASA satellite that shows the salt flats every 17 days,” Sullivan said. “They have taken pictures, and they have all these pictures that showed those five years, the salt flats actually grew.”
But scientists now say the process hasn’t yielded the desired results.
“And it turns out that what happened was by pumping all the water out, we reverse the flow of water away from the salt pan," Keach said. “And so we think that's probably not a good way to keep pumping harder, you're just going to pull more water away.
"So we’re shortcutting the natural process of salt growth and trying to replace it by putting salt on the surface.”
The racing community wanted $50 million from the state and the federal government. Instead, the state came up with $5 million. But Keach returned most of that and used $1 million to keep studying.
“We're continuing to do research on it,” Keach said. “We've got another student that we're working with at the U [University of Utah] that we're funding to continue our monitoring of the water. Again, we want to get a multi-year perspective.”
Along with research on the current laydown program and its effects on the salt flats, Keach also adds the possibility of drilling into a deeper aquifer — an underground layer of wet rocks that allows water to pass through it slowly.
“So far we have eight studies,” Sullivan said in frustration. “Not one thing has been changed. What are we doing here?”
When asked what he wanted in an ideal world, Sullivan did not hesitate.
“In an ideal world, I'd like to have that 250 million tons of salt put back on the salt flats where it belongs," he said.
Keach said it's not that simple.
“We want to try and create a mechanism that restores the natural process,” he said. “Nature is going to have the salt flats grow and get big. You're gonna get wet years, and then subsequent to a wet year, you seem to get more salt, which makes sense because you're pumping more water through the system. So drought ma be a contributor, certainly, so it's not all man that's causing the shrinkage.”
Sullivan hopes science can figure it out, before the salt flats are gone.
“It is a special place,” he added. “It's a place that now grandfathers, fathers, sons, grandsons of all races, and it's in your blood.”
