The Lake Is Shrinking — and Its Secrets Are Surfacing

There is a particular kind of eerie visibility that comes with a lake dying. As the Great Salt Lake has dropped to historic lows — reaching its record-breaking nadir of 4,188.5 feet above sea level in November 2022 — the water has pulled back to reveal what a century and a half of human activity left behind. Mud flats that were once navigable water. Shoreline that was once open lake. And, in the shallows near the marina at Great Salt Lake State Park, the bones of a steamship that has not seen daylight since the early twentieth century.

The vessel believed to be the W.E. Marsh No. 4 is approximately 120 years old, a 40-foot workhorse that served the Southern Pacific Railroad’s construction fleet during the great causeway-building era on the lake. It sank and was forgotten — not rediscovered until 2014, when a state park crew conducting a side-scan sonar search for an unrelated lost sailboat keel stumbled upon its outline on the lake floor. For years after that discovery, the wreck was visible to careful observers on sunny days, a dark shape in the clear brine, just barely submerged. Then the lake dropped further, and the Marsh No. 4 began to emerge from the water itself, its wooden bones rising into the open air for the first time in generations.

This is the Great Salt Lake telling on itself. Every foot the lake drops reveals more of what was hidden. The W.E. Marsh No. 4 is the famous example — photographed, written about, visited by curious onlookers — but the lake is believed to hold dozens of additional wrecks. Ships, vessels, equipment, and debris accumulated across a century and a half of navigation, commerce, recreation, and accident. Most of those wrecks are not historically significant in the way the Marsh No. 4 is. Most of them are simply things that sank and stayed there — and as the lake recedes, they too will eventually surface, in varying states of decay, with varying contamination profiles.

The connection between the lake’s shrinking and the pollution problem is direct. When a vessel has been sitting on the lake floor for decades, it has been slowly releasing whatever it carried into the surrounding water and sediment. As the lake drops and the surrounding lakebed dries, those contaminated sediments can become airborne dust — a documented and serious public health concern for the communities downwind of the Great Salt Lake. The underwater pollution problem and the dust problem are not separate issues. They are the same problem at different stages of the same crisis.

We raise the story of the W.E. Marsh No. 4 not to celebrate its emergence — a ship resurfacing because the lake that held it is dying is not cause for celebration. We raise it because it is the most visible proof that the Great Salt Lake’s underwater inventory is real, that it is large, and that it will not stay hidden forever. The question is whether we address it deliberately, on our own terms, or wait for the lake to force the issue.

At Fathom Restoration, we are choosing the proactive path. Our mission is to recover submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s waterways before they become the next exposed hull in a receding shoreline. Utah lake conservation demands that we think about what is in the water, not just what is around it. The Great Salt Lake deserves both — and it deserves organizations willing to do the difficult work that keeps its floor from becoming a catalogue of unaddressed contamination.

The lake is shrinking. The secrets are surfacing. We are ready.

Fathom Restoration is a disabled-veteran-led Utah 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to lake cleanup and the recovery of submerged vehicles, vessels, and debris from Utah’s lakes and waterways. Donate / Volunteer / Report a vehicle at fathomrestoration.org.

Source: https://abcnews.go.com/US/historic-ship-resurfaces-utahs-shrinking-great-salt-lake/story?id=95424624