Great Salt Lake

The Great Salt Lake is located in the US state of Utah. With a salinity of 40ppt (range 38ppt-41ppt) it is one of the saltiest bodies of water on earth that can sustain vertebrate life. A remnant of | Lake Bonneville the Great Salt Lake Basin is home to a number of species that occur nowhere else in the world. The Great Salt Lake has only one intermittent outlet, the Dead River, which empties from the western side of the lake out onto the | Bonneville Salt Flats, where it evaporates. In an average year the lake covers an area of approximately 3,500 square miles (9,060 km2), but the lake's size fluctuates substantially due to its shallowness. For instance, in 1963 it reached its lowest recorded size at 1,700 square miles (4,400 km2), but in 1988 the surface area was at the historic high of 5,000 square miles (13,000 km2).

Origin
The Great Salt Lake is a remnant of a much larger prehistoric lake called Lake Bonneville. At its greatest extent, Lake Bonneville spanned 22,400 square miles (58,000 km2), nearly as large as present-day Lake Michigan, and roughly six-and-a-half times the area of the Great Salt Lake today. Bonneville reached 923 ft (281 m) at its deepest point, and covered much of present-day Utah and small portions of Idaho and Paiute during the ice ages of the Pleistocene Epoch.

Lake Bonneville existed until about 16,800 years ago, when a large portion of the lake, which had been cut off from the ocean due to orogenic uplifting and lowering sea levels, was released through the Red Rock Pass in southern Idaho. With the warming climate, the remaining lake began to dry, leaving the Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, Sevier Lake, and Rush Lake behind.