Source: Hannah Osborne. Feb 8, 2016. Bolivia’s vanishing Lake Poopó: ESA images show fully evaporated lake from space. International Business Times.

Preface.   I think that declining oil will be the main cause of civilization to collapse, since it is the energy that makes all other activities possible, but there are so many other contenders I wonder if scholars in the future will argue over what was the main coup de grace.

Such as loss of water leading to less food production, mass migrations, and more. Abbott (2023) states that the Great Salt Lake could evaporate within 5 years unless water is conserved.  But hello, what about limiting development, immigration, and taxing families with more than two children? It would seem capitalism has squelched all discussion of birth control, limits to growth, and overshoot.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Abbott BW et al (2023) Emergency measures needed to rescue Great Salt Lake from ongoing collapse. https://pws.byu.edu/GSL%20report%202023

Great Salt Lake is facing unprecedented danger. Without a dramatic increase in water flow to the lake in 2023 and 2024, its disappearance could cause immense damage to Utah’s public health, environment, and economy.

1. Great Salt Lake is a keystone ecosystem in the Western Hemisphere. The lake and its wetlands provide minerals for Utah’s industries, thousands of local jobs, and habitat for 10 million migratory birds. Fertilizer and brine shrimp from the lake feed millions of people worldwide. The lake provides $2.5 billion in direct economic activity yearly, as well as increasing precipitation, suppressing toxic dust, and supporting 80% of Utah’s wetlands.

2. Excessive water use is destroying Great Salt Lake. At 19 feet below its average natural level since 1850, the lake is in uncharted territory. It has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area. Our unsustainable water use is desiccating habitat, exposing toxic dust, and driving salinity to levels incompatible with the lake’s food webs. The lake’s drop has accelerated since 2020, with an average deficit of 1.2 million acre-feet per year. If this loss rate continues, the lake as we know it is on track to disappear in five years.

3. We are underestimating the consequences of losing the lake. Examples from around the world show that saline lake loss triggers a long-term cycle of environmental, health, and economic suffering. Without a coordinated rescue, we can expect widespread air and water pollution, numerous Endangered Species Act listings, and declines in agriculture, industry, and overall quality of life.

4. The lake needs an additional million acre-feet per year to reverse its decline. This would increase average streamflow to ~2.5 million acre-feet per year, beginning a gradual refilling. Depending on future weather conditions, achieving this level of flow will require cutting consumptive water use in the Great Salt Lake watershed by a third to a half. Recent efforts have returned less than 0.1 million acre-feet per year to the lake, with most conserved water held in reservoirs or delivered to other users rather than released to the lake.

The lake is a vital link in the Pacific Flyway, providing food and habitat for more than 10 million migratory birds and wildlife throughout the Wasatch Front. Almost 350 bird species depend on Great Salt Lake habitats. The lake’s diverse wetland, island, and open-water environments are becoming even more crucial as habitat is lost or degraded throughout the western US.

Great Salt Lake also provides numerous ecosystem services, including protection of air quality, removal of water pollution, and moderation of local weather. Its dramatic vistas have inspired countless scientists, pioneers, artists, writers, photographers, and recreationists.

Over the last three years, the lake has received less than a third of its natural streamflow because of excessive water diversions.

The depletion of water is even more severe than it appears because groundwater is not included in these estimates. Approximately 26 million acre-feet have been lost from the lake itself, but twice that amount may have been lost from the aquifers around the lake due to water table drop. These empty aquifers could slow the rate of rebound after runoff is increased.

Agriculture consumes most of the water, as well as mining (9%), cities & industry (9%). Climate change warming has contributed about 9% of the lakes decline.

Irrigated agriculture is destroying saline lakes on every continent except Antarctica. The loss of a saline lake sets off a sequence of environmental and economic damage that is extremely difficult to reverse, such as air and water pollution, collapse of food production, economic depression, lower property values, mass migration, social conflict from loss of jobs and quality of life, loss of industry, and devastation of lake and wetland ecosystems.

Lakebed sediments are already being exposed that are laden with pollutants such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, nickel, chromium, lead, copper, selenium, organic contaminants, and cyanotoxins. The dust in turn causes health effects such as reproductive disfunction, developmental defects, cognitive impairment, cardiovascular damage, and cancer. Plus damage agricultural crops, degrade soil fertility, and cause premature snowmelt when deposited on snowpack.

Ecologically food webs are disrupted or destroyed. The climate can experience extreme temperature swings, desertification, and more. The salinity of the main body of the lake has climbed to ~19%. At this level, the brine flies and brine shrimp cannot maintain their populations because of decreased primary productivity (i.e., loss of their food sources) and direct inhibition of their life cycles. These invertebrates feed migratory birds and support much of the lake’s industry.

Kate Ravilious. 4 March 2016. Many of world’s lakes are vanishing and some may be gone forever. NewScientist.

Bolivia’s second largest lake has vanished into thin air. In December, Lake Poopó became a dry salt pan and its largest lake – Lake Titicaca – is heading towards trouble, too. The combination of silting up and irrigation withdrawal from the Desaguadero River, which feeds Poopó, together with climate change and the extra warmth from current El Niño, were enough to finish this lake off.

Recent research and new data suggest that lakes in other parts of the world may also be on their way out.

“Considering the size of the lake – 2700 square kilometers (1042 square miles) – this is quite an astounding event, with slim prospects of recovery,” says Dirk Hoffmann from the Bolivia Mountain Institute. “This event should serve as a real warning. Eventually, we can expect Lake Titicaca to go the same way.”

Air temperature has risen by around 0.7 °C in the Andes over the past 70 years and lakes are being evaporated faster than they are replenished. Lake Titicaca is close to a tipping point. Just 1 to 2 °C of atmospheric warming – which is expected by 2050 – could be enough to evaporate the top few meters, which would shut down the Desaguadero River and dry up all the water bodies that this river feeds. Such an outcome would be catastrophic for the 3 million inhabitants of Bolivia’s highlands, including the city of La Paz.

“If Titicaca stops supplying the Desaguadero River then the region will enter a new climate regime and the entire Andean Plateau will change from a benign agricultural area to an arid inhospitable area,” says Mark Bush, biologist at Florida Institute of Technology. “This happened during two prior interglacials and each time the dry event lasted for thousands of years.”

It’s not just Andean lakes that are in trouble. Evidence from around the world suggests that lakes are warming, shrinking or disappearing, with huge impacts on ecosystems.

The disappearance of lakes across southern Europe, the Middle East and central Asia has been blamed on a rise in water extraction to meet the needs of agriculture and a growing and increasingly water-thirsty population. Climate change has compounded the problem.

“This region is experiencing a drier climate now, which is also driving increased water extraction,” says Erik Jeppesen, a freshwater ecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark. The eastern Mediterranean has just gone through its worst drought in 900 years.

As a result, lakes on the Central Anatolian Plateau lost around half of their surface area between 2003 and 2010, says Meryem Beklioğlu, a freshwater ecologist at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. Lake Akşehir has dried up completely, she says, resulting in the extinction of one species of fish, Alburnus nasreddini, and endangering two other endemic fish species, Gobio gobio intermedius and Leuciscus anatolicus.

Beklioğlu’s models predict that, at current rate of water extraction, one of the largest lakes in this region – Lake Beysehir – will be gone by 2040. “This water is critical for irrigation and for the local economy, but right now we are cutting off the branch we are sitting on,” she says.

Many of Turkey’s lakes are shallow and this makes them particularly vulnerable. As they shrink, salt levels skyrocket. “It happens really fast – just four or five years – and has caused water-rationing in the past,” Beklioğlu says. The smaller volume of water also concentrates nutrients and encourages algal blooms that can be toxic.

“Ultimately, the drying of the lakes along with the loss of groundwater and salinisation, will make the land less viable for agriculture in this region,” says Jeppesen. “This will put significant pressure on northern countries to produce more food, leading to deteriorating water quality in northern lakes due to increased fertiliser run-off entering lakes.”

Further east, changing rainfall patterns coupled with a mining boom and agricultural irrigation have caused more than a quarter of the lakes in Mongolia to dry up by since the 1980s.

Similarly, lakes in south-east Australia have shrunk during recent droughts, with one of the largest lakes – Lake Alexandrina – losing over two-thirds of its volume and experiencing a fivefold increase in salinity in 2009. Heavy water usage by farms coupled with climate change are thought to have been to blame. “This caused localised extinctions of native fish species,” says Kane Aldridge, a limnologist at The University of Adelaide. “Droughts are a natural part of the climate here, but they are expected to become more common under climate change.”

Arctic ponds

One place that is warming especially rapidly is the Arctic. Viewed from above, it is dotted with millions of ponds – but far fewer than a few decades ago. A 2015 study in northern Alaska shows that over the last 60 years the surface area of ponds has diminished by nearly a third, and nearly a fifth of the ponds have vanished.

This is largely due to the permafrost thawing. When frozen soil thaws, the water can drain, bursting out sideways or disappearing underground. “It is like pulling the plug from a bathtub,” says Guido Grosse from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam, who has used satellite and aerial photos to document this loss. And once they start to drain they can disappear fast. In July 2014, an Arctic lake with the volume of around 350 Olympic swimming pools emptied in just 36 hours.

“These ponds are the baby lakes, and if they disappear then we will have no Arctic lakes in the long term,” says Christian Andresen from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This will be bad news for fish like salmon, and migratory birds who depend on these lakes, says Grosse.

What to do?

Despite the trend, most of the world’s lakes are unlikely to disappear any time soon. And in some areas, such as the Tibetan plateau, the number of lakes is expanding. Rapid glacier melting is cooling existing lakes and creating new lakes there: 1099 in total between 1990 and 2010, representing a 23 per cent increase in surface area.

In the regions that are losing lakes, though, wiser water management could help slow down shrinking, says Beklioğlu.

And for warming lakes, says Jeppesen, reducing the input of nutrients could help to maintain the ecosystem balance. Hard engineering – dredging channels and building dams – can be a last resort.

But as the ill-fated Aral Sea in central Asia that went from being the world’s fourth largest lake to all but vanishing in less than a century shows, once a lake is lost it is very hard to recover. “Closed lake basins and shallow lakes are the most vulnerable to drying,” says Lisa Borre from the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in New York. “Climate change is a major issue and we will see more Aral Seas and Lake Poopós in the future.”