Vanishing Act: Desiccated Lake in Chile Has Parallels to Struggling Great Salt Lake

Lake Aculeo is gone. Just a decade ago in central Chile, water lapped across an area four times the size of New York’s Central Park, with depths up to 20 feet. But by April 2019, the water had been completely extracted, replaced by swirling clouds of dust and opportunistic vegetation rooted sporadically across a stretch of dry earth.

A combination of factors contributed to the lake’s ultimate demise: drought, changes in local irrigation, demands from growing urban populations and ongoing climate change. Before it disappeared, the lake had been a popular vacation retreat and fishing destination for residents of Santiago. Now the area offers only a vast, empty depression on the landscape — and a poignant case study for what may very well happen on similar sites around the globe.

Will Munger, Ph.D. student in the Department of Environment and Society in the Quinney College of Natural Resources, captured on camera one of the many pirouetting dust storms that meander across the dry bed of the former lake, the vortex inhaling dirt from the dry surface and spewing it heavenward against the backdrop of a blue sky.

Munger was in Chile participating in the PATHWAYS Program. This National Science Foundation-funded fellowship brings together young scientists from around North and South America to explore Lake Aculeo as a case study for similar slow-motion ecological disasters. The circumstances that brought this ecosystem to its knees, to him, had a familiar ring.

“I grew up in Utah. I’ve been on the Great Salt Lake my whole life,” Munger said. “These issues are near and dear to me.”

He observed “dust tornadoes” and water shortages in Chile that impacted everything from air quality to population growth, and realized that a lot of these issues were parallel to what occurs in Utah. The area surrounding Lake Aculeo had unmanaged systems with multiple wells extracting groundwater. The region had a focus on export-oriented cash crops: avocados and cherries, which sent water outside of its home basin (similar to the hay and alfalfa that’s grown in northern Utah.) A growing urban population next to the lake demanded water — and the entire region was in the throes of an ongoing drought.

The fate of the Great Salt Lake is not written in stone, but comparing the two lake systems can certainly help people to think about the overall social, ecological and hydrological systems, and how we want them to work together, Munger said.

“This is like the canary in the coal mine. These lake systems are drying out, posing huge watershed, air quality and ecological issues,” he said.

Developing global networks of connected researchers around these issues may be a pivotal part of the solution, he said. The research project launched in Chile is called the Transect of the Americas and will continue a comparative study of similar lakes across the Americas, including the Great Salt Lake. The Transect of the Americas and the PATHWAYS Program are led by faculty from Washington State University and the University of New Mexico.

“We are building research coordination networks that can help support resilient watershed management in a changing climate. Whether you are working on the Salt Lake, or with the Colorado River, in Chile or on the former Lake Urmia in Iran, we have to be connected and share solutions. There is so much that we can learn from each other.”