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The Great Salt Lake: Historically Low Water Levels · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

0:06
SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Planet Geno, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
0:31
SPEAKER_02: Chris, what's up, man?
0:33
SPEAKER_02: It's been a while.
0:34
SPEAKER_02: We've uh I know it's been a long time.
0:36
SPEAKER_02: You've been out on this summer science trip for three weeks, and we haven't talked in a long time.
0:40
SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, man, I've gotten abandoned by my buddy Chris.
0:43
SPEAKER_02: I haven't like talking, you've been out of cell range, you know, sporadic text messages.
0:48
SPEAKER_00: I miss talking to you, man.
0:50
SPEAKER_00: It actually is weird.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: I know.
0:52
SPEAKER_00: We talk every day, and then we've for the last five weeks, really.
0:55
SPEAKER_00: It's I I find myself missing my little buddy.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: I miss hanging out with you, man.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: This has been such a bummer.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: It's so good to be back in the saddle, though.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: It is.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: It's yep.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: I yeah, it's gonna be good to get back into a routine.
1:07
SPEAKER_00: But I I sh I mean I had a great summer, you know.
1:09
SPEAKER_00: Just uh I I don't know.
1:11
SPEAKER_00: We went from coast to coast in one week.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: So amazing.
1:15
SPEAKER_00: Amazing.
1:16
SPEAKER_02: And uh and all the kids on Summer Science, all the high school kids, they're uh they behave themselves.
1:20
SPEAKER_02: No major issues?
1:21
SPEAKER_00: No major issues.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: We got them all back safe and sound.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: That's the big thing.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: I always take a big sigh of relief when I get back home.
1:28
SPEAKER_02: So oh my god, I can't imagine.
1:30
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, you can.
1:30
SPEAKER_02: You were one of them.
1:31
SPEAKER_02: Well, I can't imagine being the boss of students like me.
1:34
SPEAKER_02: That would be super stressful.
1:37
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
1:38
SPEAKER_02: Well, hey, uh we got some super fun stuff coming up on Planet Geo.
1:42
SPEAKER_02: I can't wait to get into the fall.
1:43
SPEAKER_02: We got some cool interviews coming.
1:45
SPEAKER_02: But today, we got a little Geo short, and uh and we're talking about the great Salt Lake, right?
1:52
SPEAKER_00: Yes, we are.
1:52
SPEAKER_00: Should we do some introductions first?
1:55
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, okay, let's do that.
1:56
SPEAKER_02: It's been a while.
1:57
SPEAKER_02: I forget kind of who you are.
1:58
SPEAKER_02: If remind me now, I think you're Chris Bulheis.
2:01
SPEAKER_02: Balhuis?
2:02
SPEAKER_02: Bulhuis?
2:03
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Balhuis.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Bulhuis.
2:04
SPEAKER_02: Bulhuis.
2:05
SPEAKER_02: Yep.
2:05
SPEAKER_02: Chris Balhuis, and uh, you are my former high school teacher.
2:09
SPEAKER_02: You are a high school teacher in the great state of Michigan, uh, a nationally recognized earth science teacher.
2:14
SPEAKER_02: You won the National Earth Science Teacher of the Year Award in 2013.
2:18
SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, we go back kind of a long way.
2:21
SPEAKER_02: You taught me the basics of geoscience, which uh was a great time.
2:24
SPEAKER_02: And you taught me some advanced geoscience as well throughout the years.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: Mostly basic.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: I don't know about that.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: All right, and you are Dr.
2:33
SPEAKER_00: Jesse Rymink, like you said, one of my former students.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: You went on to get your PhD in the geosciences and now are a professor at of geoscience at Penn State University.
2:44
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's right.
2:45
SPEAKER_02: Penn State, we are.
2:46
SPEAKER_02: There we go.
2:47
SPEAKER_02: And this is Planet Geo, our podcast where we talk about the earth sciences, the geosciences, the geology, and kind of talk about how important it is to society.
2:56
SPEAKER_02: It's one of these fields that's grossly undervalued by society, in our opinion.
3:00
SPEAKER_02: We think that it deserves more respect.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: More recognition, more thought, more credit.
3:06
SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, today what do we got, Chris?
3:08
SPEAKER_00: What are we talking about?
3:09
SPEAKER_00: Well, we're gonna talk about the Great Salt Lake today in Utah.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: It's an interesting thing that, you know, I just came back from out west to spend a lot of time out west this summer, and it is just uh everything that that you've heard about how dry it is and how hot it is out there is true.
3:23
SPEAKER_00: Lots of wildfires, lots of drought.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: Right.
3:26
SPEAKER_00: That brings up a point then about the Great Salt Lake and how it's like really close right now to being at a record low level.
3:37
SPEAKER_00: I think it's 2.4 inches above the record low in 1963.
3:44
SPEAKER_00: This is a massive lake.
3:46
SPEAKER_01: This is a huge lake.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: It's it's a huge lake, but it's a shallow lake.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: You know, it's I think right now at its maximum depth, it's something on the order of 33 feet, 33 or 35 feet, something like that.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and so as levels then shift, uh uh uh you know, with less water in it, the levels drop a little bit.
4:05
SPEAKER_00: These these small changes in lake levels can really affect the where the shorelines are because it's such a shallow lake.
4:12
SPEAKER_02: You know, right, right.
4:13
SPEAKER_02: Um and the other thing, so so this is a potentially historic level, lake level, historically low lake level, but we're gonna kind of focus here on the Geo Short of on the Great Salt Lake, these sort of hypersaline lakes in general, how they form, why it's so salty, why it's called the Great Salt Lake, why Salt Lake City is called Salt Lake City.
4:31
SPEAKER_02: Um and so, Chris, are you ready for a little uh little factoid thrown at you here?
4:35
SPEAKER_02: I am.
4:35
SPEAKER_02: I can hit it up.
4:36
SPEAKER_02: So salt has historically been this very important commodity for humans, and in fact, the term salary, our English word salary, comes from the Latin word salarium, which was the money paid to Roman soldiers that they had to use to buy salt.
4:54
SPEAKER_02: So our s our term salary comes from Roman soldiers getting paid in salt, basically.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: Where where did you come up with this, honestly?
5:03
SPEAKER_00: This is a factoid.
5:03
SPEAKER_02: Um this comes up this is a factoid.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: This is But I want to know where you came up with this.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: Like what made you think that that was something I needed to hear?
5:11
SPEAKER_00: Well, we're talking about salt.
5:13
SPEAKER_02: Salt's important, man.
5:14
SPEAKER_02: Hey, I like it.
5:15
SPEAKER_02: No, I don't.
5:16
SPEAKER_02: I probably have too much salt in my food.
5:18
SPEAKER_00: I do too, but salt drives flavor.
5:20
SPEAKER_02: That's true.
5:20
SPEAKER_00: It is so important.
5:22
SPEAKER_00: I'm actually not ripping on you because I I love salt.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: I I do over salt stuff, but all right, all right.
5:27
SPEAKER_02: Here's the problem, Chris, is you're giving me a hard time about this this little factoid I gave you, and I know you're gonna be using this in class someday, sometime this year.
5:35
SPEAKER_00: I actually will.
5:37
SPEAKER_00: Everybody's gotta be good at something, and the only thing that I'm really good at is stealing other people's material.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: I steal it, I own it, I say it like I invented it, and I don't give credit to anybody.
5:48
SPEAKER_00: So that's good.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: That's good.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: Hey, all right.
5:50
SPEAKER_02: So, first of all, let's kind of set the stage by saying that the Great Salt Lake is this really salty lake, right?
5:56
SPEAKER_02: Um, and we've talked about salt and saltiness and how us geologists refer to salt and what that means before in previous episodes.
6:04
SPEAKER_02: So go back to our episode that is titled Hard Water and Why the Oceans Are Salty.
6:09
SPEAKER_02: This is we can get into a full discussion of this in that episode.
6:12
SPEAKER_02: Um, but there are a lot of these like really salty lakes.
6:15
SPEAKER_02: Think of the Caspian Sea, the Salton Sea in California, the Dead Sea, which we've seen pictures of, and this is the Great Salt Lake that is intimately associated with the Bonneville Salt Flats.
6:24
SPEAKER_02: And so think of you know those car commercials where you see a car driving across this white sort of expanse, right?
6:31
SPEAKER_02: And where the the world land speed records are always set.
6:34
SPEAKER_02: This is the Bonneville Salt Flats.
6:36
SPEAKER_02: It's the same region, uh, geologically speaking, as the Great Salt Lake.
6:40
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, have you ever been there?
6:41
SPEAKER_02: Have you ever been to Salt Lake City?
6:43
SPEAKER_02: I have not.
6:43
SPEAKER_02: No, I've driven through and been through that area, but I've never seen the Great Salt Lake.
6:48
SPEAKER_02: Have you?
6:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, I have.
6:49
SPEAKER_00: It was uh it was a number of years ago, four or five years ago, I think.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: I mean, you just can't avoid it.
6:54
SPEAKER_00: You can see the salt mining all over the place, you can see the great salt flats.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: It's it's really pretty cool.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: So, Chris, how do they get this way?
7:02
SPEAKER_02: Why is the lake so salty?
7:03
SPEAKER_00: So, before we get into how it got so salty, I want to just real fast touch on why the levels are so low.
7:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, this winter they had a low snow year.
7:13
SPEAKER_02: This is snow, this is snowpack in the mountains.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: Snowpack in the mountains, yeah.
7:17
SPEAKER_00: Usually in the wintertime, the snowpack then, which will melt off in the spring and feed the lake, in the spring, they get a like a two-foot bump in elevation just from snow melt.
7:27
SPEAKER_00: This year, because of low snow and because of dry soil, with the dry soil, what happens then is the snow melt just the the water soaks into the soil and doesn't make its way into the great salt lake.
7:38
SPEAKER_00: So this year they got a six-inch bump when they usually get a two-foot elevation gain in the spring.
7:45
SPEAKER_00: But anyway, so let's go ahead, Jesse.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about why the Great Salt Lake is so, so salty.
7:51
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and I think we could sort of start off talking about this by explaining how the Salt Lake is sort of divided, because there's this really interesting feature.
7:58
SPEAKER_02: There's a railroad track right through the middle of the Great Salt Lake.
8:02
SPEAKER_02: This was built, well, originally it was built with a bridge construction early on, but in 1959 they built it with a rock it's just an earthen mound that that spans the lake.
8:12
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so there's very little communication between the northern lake and the southern part of the lake, meaning water communication.
8:19
SPEAKER_02: So if we think about that, and the northern part is always a lot saltier than the southern part.
8:25
SPEAKER_02: The northern part is something like 25% salinity, 25% of the water is salt, and the southern part is something more like 5 to 15% on average, it fluctuates.
8:35
SPEAKER_02: The difference here between the north and the south, first of all, they don't communicate very much, and the second part is that the south has all the rivers flowing into it.
8:45
SPEAKER_02: So there's three major rivers that flow into the southern part of the lake, and the north has no inlets, no real rivers coming in.
8:52
SPEAKER_02: So this really drives home the key point.
8:55
SPEAKER_02: And Chris, what is the key point?
8:57
SPEAKER_00: Well, we need to go back to you know, the episode that we did on why the oceans are salty in the first place is where is all this salt coming from?
9:05
SPEAKER_00: What makes the Great Salt Lake different from most of the other lakes in the world?
9:11
SPEAKER_00: Rivers carry by far the most amount of dissolved salts to the lake, to the oceans, to wherever they're going.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: They're the major source of the dissolved solids, which is where the salts come from.
9:25
SPEAKER_00: That brings up the point of well, wait a second, you know, if you taste river water, it doesn't taste salty, but it compounds over time.
9:32
SPEAKER_00: It just keeps the rivers keep flowing, they're carrying just tiny amounts of salt in them, but then it depends on the dynamics of the lake.
9:40
SPEAKER_00: And what Jesse makes the Great Salt Lake different from most of the other lakes in the world.
9:46
SPEAKER_02: The difference is that there is no outlet.
9:49
SPEAKER_02: So the only way that water gets out of the Great Salt Lake is by evaporation.
9:55
SPEAKER_02: And salt does not evaporate, salt precipitates out.
9:59
SPEAKER_02: So what happens here is water flows in, it flows into the south, and this lake is, Chris, at you nailed it, it's really shallow, it's really big, so there's a lot of evaporation going on.
10:10
SPEAKER_02: So water comes in, it evaporates out, the salt gets concentrated because the salt is not leaving by evaporation.
10:17
SPEAKER_02: And the northern part has no inlet, it has no freshwater inlet, so it only gets its water from the southern part.
10:23
SPEAKER_02: So you imagine this big, flat, broad, shallow lake.
10:27
SPEAKER_02: It has water flowing into it, relatively fresh water from the rivers.
10:30
SPEAKER_02: Evaporation is occurring, and all the water leaves, but the salt's left behind.
10:34
SPEAKER_02: Now that's the southern part of the lake.
10:36
SPEAKER_02: That flows through a very narrow channel into the northern part of the lake, which is again a very big, broad, shallow lake, and it's receiving already salty water.
10:47
SPEAKER_02: The only way out is for the water to leave by evaporation, the salt stays behind, and it gets further distilled in this next step.
10:54
SPEAKER_02: And that's how we get salt in these hyper-sailine lakes like the Great Salt Lake.
11:00
SPEAKER_00: And then they do have these spillways that connect the southern part to the northern part, but there's very little transfer of water.
11:07
SPEAKER_00: It's not like it's circulating back and forth through that.
11:10
SPEAKER_00: So you know, you the northern part concentrates more salt because it not there aren't any major rivers that are dumping fresher water into the northern part.
11:21
SPEAKER_00: It's only in the southern part.
11:23
SPEAKER_02: Right.
11:24
SPEAKER_00: So exactly.
11:25
SPEAKER_00: Now that's interesting too.
11:27
SPEAKER_00: The northern part tends to have a really distinctive hue to it, the color of it.
11:33
SPEAKER_00: It's like this lavender or this purple and sometimes red color to it.
11:38
SPEAKER_00: And that's because of the salinity, how salty the water is.
11:42
SPEAKER_00: There are certain algae that thrive in that that reflect these colors.
11:47
SPEAKER_02: And so to kind of calibrate to the saltiness levels we're talking about, river water has 0.05% salt in it, typically.
11:56
SPEAKER_02: And when we say salt, we're not talking just table salt, not just sodium chloride, but potassium chloride, anything with ionic bonds, uh magnesium chloride, calcium carbonate.
12:05
SPEAKER_02: It's anything that's dissolved in the water.
12:08
SPEAKER_02: Anything that's dissolved in the water.
12:10
SPEAKER_02: And so that's river water.
12:12
SPEAKER_02: The oceans are about 3.5% salinity, about 3.5% salt.
12:17
SPEAKER_02: The Great Salt Lake is something between 6 and uh 25%, depending on where you are, what season, uh, what part of the lake you're talking about.
12:26
SPEAKER_02: And the Dead Sea is something upwards of 30% salt.
12:28
SPEAKER_02: And there is a small little lake in Antarctica that gets up to 40% salinity, and this is a lake that rarely freezes because it has so much salt in it.
12:36
SPEAKER_02: Um that's crazy.
12:37
SPEAKER_02: That salt is really important and interesting, and we could we'll talk about the the mining.
12:41
SPEAKER_02: You kind of brought up the sort of mining that goes on that you saw.
12:44
SPEAKER_02: And so the Great Salt Lake contains this astonished me, a massive amount of salt.
12:49
SPEAKER_02: 4.5 billion tons of salt.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's pretty now.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: They and you can see this if you ever you drive through Salt Lake City, you can't help but notice these huge mounds of salt.
13:02
SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and actually, you can see this really well flying into San Francisco.
13:06
SPEAKER_02: So you fly in, if you fly, if you if you have the right flight pathway, you can see these big colored basins as you're flying into the San Francisco East Bay.
13:13
SPEAKER_02: Let's see.
13:14
SPEAKER_02: I think I've seen it when I came in from the south.
13:16
SPEAKER_02: I was sitting on the east side of the plain, and you could see these beautiful colored salt beds.
13:20
SPEAKER_02: They're doing salt mining there.
13:22
SPEAKER_02: Like what colors?
13:22
SPEAKER_02: What do you mean?
13:23
SPEAKER_02: Uh, they're like the pinks and purples and green hues, and it's all these bacteria, right?
13:28
SPEAKER_02: Same thing you mentioned from the northern part of the Great Salt Lake.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
13:31
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
13:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: Something that I think is really interesting about the mining process, one is like how they do it.
13:37
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, how do they do it?
13:38
SPEAKER_00: I don't actually know that.
13:39
SPEAKER_00: So they just they have these huge pipes that pump water from the Great Salt Lake into these evaporation ponds.
13:47
SPEAKER_00: So they just flood it with several feet of water and then they just let it evaporate.
13:53
SPEAKER_02: Oh, and then they go and kind of scrape it up or something like that?
13:56
SPEAKER_00: Literally, they go into the front end loader and scrape it up and put it in dump trucks.
13:59
SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: It is so interesting.
14:02
SPEAKER_00: That's how they do it.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: Okay, alright.
14:03
SPEAKER_02: I gotta do a deep dive on this now.
14:05
SPEAKER_02: I want to know if I get my salt, you know, if the salt I eat in my food is coming from the Great Salt Lake, or where I gotta do a deep dive into this now.
14:11
SPEAKER_02: All right, I'm gonna get I'm gonna go check out.
14:12
SPEAKER_02: I know we'll report back.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: Okay, all right.
14:15
SPEAKER_00: I want to report back on sea salt too.
14:17
SPEAKER_01: Okay, there we go.
14:18
SPEAKER_00: Um You interrupted my train of thought here.
14:20
SPEAKER_00: Sorry.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but okay, so that's how they do it.
14:24
SPEAKER_00: But it's interesting too that they mine approximately the same amount of salt annually that comes in from the rivers.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: So they've measured the dissolved solid content of the rivers that are dumping into the Great Salt Lake.
14:38
SPEAKER_00: So they know on average how much salt is coming in, and that's how much they take out.
14:43
SPEAKER_02: So how much is it?
14:44
SPEAKER_02: What's the what are the numbers?
14:46
SPEAKER_00: They're taking out a little more than two million tons of salt each year.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: Oh wow.
14:52
SPEAKER_02: Okay, that's it's a lot, but not compared to the amount in the lake, I suppose.
14:56
SPEAKER_00: It's well, no, because they have 4.5 billion tons of salt in the lake, but they have about two million tons of salt that enters the lake each year from the rivers, from the three major rivers.
15:07
SPEAKER_02: Okay, so we're kind of a uh a salt neutral uh process here in a way.
15:11
SPEAKER_02: You know, the other interesting thing about this, and it relates back to the Bonneville salt flats, is that this Great Salt Lake, this is really just the remnants of what used to be this huge glacial lake.
15:22
SPEAKER_02: So when the glaciers were further south, the glaciers were melting, and they were all flowing into, again, this really restricted basin.
15:29
SPEAKER_02: So we're gonna kind of come back to why this particular lake has no outlet, is that the water is flowing into a region where the geology, the tectonics, and the topography are such that the water can't get out.
15:42
SPEAKER_02: So it flows into this basin and it has nowhere to go, so it can't kind of break out of the mountain ranges that surround it, and so it just sits there and evaporates.
15:50
SPEAKER_02: It's also in a very arid climate, so it evaporates very quickly.
15:54
SPEAKER_02: And so this former Lake Bonneville, which existed about 20,000 years ago, is what deposited all of the salt that is in that whole region, the Bonneville salt flats, and it deposited tons of salt.
16:06
SPEAKER_02: Part of it is now in the Great Salt Lake still, and part of it is deposited out on these flats in the surrounding regions.
16:13
SPEAKER_02: Yes, yeah.
16:14
SPEAKER_02: All right.
16:15
SPEAKER_02: Well, I think I mean that's a that's kind of a wrap.
16:17
SPEAKER_02: I am gonna do a deep dive on where our salt comes from in the sort of logistics chain of salt, and I'll report back.
16:24
SPEAKER_00: So okay, it's another geo short, I think.
16:26
SPEAKER_02: It's another it's another short, totally.
16:28
SPEAKER_02: That's right, that's right.
16:29
SPEAKER_02: I think it's great.
16:30
SPEAKER_02: I mean, this is something super interesting.
16:31
SPEAKER_02: Do you have anything else, Chris, to add on the on the Great Salt Lake?
16:34
SPEAKER_00: I do.
16:34
SPEAKER_00: It's a random thing.
16:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, it deals with uh just the interconnectedness of all this stuff, right?
16:40
SPEAKER_00: So, how do falling lake levels affect some of the biological concerns of the Great Salt Lake?
16:45
SPEAKER_00: And here's something that's that I found to be really interesting.
16:48
SPEAKER_02: Oh, this is hey, anybody who's a biologist, perk up your ears.
16:51
SPEAKER_02: It's the first interesting thing to you, and you're also kind of a loser, but this doesn't happen very often.
16:57
SPEAKER_00: I know.
16:58
SPEAKER_00: This does not happen very often.
17:00
SPEAKER_00: So this involves the American white pelican, which is one of the largest birds in North America.
17:06
SPEAKER_00: And they have this nesting spot on an island in the Great Salt Lake.
17:11
SPEAKER_00: Okay, and it's um, I think 20% of these birds, that's their their nesting spot.
17:19
SPEAKER_00: So it's a large cross-section of their whole population.
17:23
SPEAKER_00: And but what's happened then is with the lowering levels now down to historic lows, they there are land bridges that go out to the island now, which has allowed foxes and coyotes then to migrate out there looking for food.
17:36
SPEAKER_00: And so it scares the pelicans off the nest, and then their eggs get eaten by gulls, and so it's it's affecting their population as well.
17:45
SPEAKER_00: So it's just like the the way all of this stuff interacts is is uh very interesting to me.
17:50
SPEAKER_02: And you know what?
17:51
SPEAKER_02: It all starts with freaking geoscience.
17:53
SPEAKER_02: I mean, the biology just follows along with whatever the geoscience tells it to do, and uh, it's so good.
18:00
SPEAKER_02: Geoscience is just so good, so good.
18:03
SPEAKER_00: Biology is is the geoscience lapdog.
18:05
SPEAKER_02: That's exactly right.
18:06
SPEAKER_02: It just follows along.
18:07
SPEAKER_02: If if geology says we want a mountain range here, the animals have to deal with it.
18:12
SPEAKER_02: I mean, that's just the way it is.
18:13
SPEAKER_00: So when the shorelines decide to shift, you know, transgress and regress, the biology has to follow along with it.
18:19
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
18:20
SPEAKER_02: Just follow our lead, biologists.
18:22
SPEAKER_02: Follow our lead, man.
18:23
SPEAKER_00: The thing I don't like is when the biology covers up our geology, though.
18:27
SPEAKER_00: That's the thing I do like moss and lichen and all that stuff.
18:30
SPEAKER_02: Lichens and trees and animals and humans always covering up the geology, right, Chris?
18:36
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
18:36
SPEAKER_00: That's right.
18:38
SPEAKER_02: All right, well, the great salt lake is nearing record lows, and uh it's important, and we've just told you why it's important.
18:46
SPEAKER_02: So with that, follow us on uh Instagram, Twitter, Facebook.
18:51
SPEAKER_02: We are at Planet Geocast, and you can uh you can visit our new website, planetgeocast.com.
18:57
SPEAKER_02: Hit us up, send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com.
19:00
SPEAKER_02: We'd love hearing feedback.
19:01
SPEAKER_02: Hit us up on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, any of those.
19:04
SPEAKER_02: Stay tuned for some excellent geoscience content coming your way soon.
19:08
SPEAKER_02: All right.
19:08
SPEAKER_02: Sounds good.
19:09
SPEAKER_02: See you next week.
19:10
SPEAKER_02: Peace.