There are several maps dating back to 1575 that show the Great Salt Lake at the correct latitude and longitude, within an accuracy of a few degrees. One of the local Shoshone tribes, the Western Goshute tribe, referred to the lake as Pi'a-pa, meaning "big water", or Ti'tsa-pa, meaning "bad water". At the time of Salt Lake City's founding, the valley was within the territory of the Northwestern Shoshone however, occupation was seasonal, near streams emptying from canyons into the Salt Lake Valley. The Shoshone, Ute, and Paiute have lived near the Great Salt Lake for thousands of years. History Stansbury's 1852 map of the Great Salt Lake and adjacent country in the Utah Territory With the warming climate, the remaining lake began to dry, leaving the Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, Sevier Lake, and Rush Lake behind. Lake Bonneville existed until about 16,800 years ago, when a large portion of the lake was released through the Red Rock Pass in Idaho, resulting in cataclysmic floods. Bonneville reached 923 ft (281 m) at its deepest point and covered much of present-day Utah and small portions of Idaho and Nevada during the ice ages of the Pleistocene Epoch. At its greatest extent, Lake Bonneville spanned 22,400 square miles (58,000 km 2), nearly as large as present-day Lake Michigan, and roughly ten times the area of the Great Salt Lake today. The Great Salt Lake is a remnant of a much larger prehistoric lake called Lake Bonneville. Origin Map of Pleistocene lakes in the Great Basin of western North America, showing the path of the Bonneville Flood along the Snake River The lake has been called "America's Dead Sea" and provides a habitat for millions of native birds, brine shrimp, shorebirds, and waterfowl, including the largest staging population of Wilson's phalarope in the world. This density causes swimming in the lake to feel similar to floating. Since the lake has no outlet besides evaporation, these minerals accumulate and give the lake high salinity (far saltier than seawater) and density. The lake's three major tributaries, the Jordan, Weber, and Bear rivers together deposit around 1.1 million tons of minerals in the lake per year. Continued shrinkage could turn the lake into a bowl of toxic dust, poisoning the air around Salt Lake City. In 2021, after years of sustained drought and increased water diversion upstream of the lake, it fell to its lowest recorded area at 950 square miles (2,500 km 2), falling below the previous low set in 1963. In the 1980s, it reached a historic high of 3,300 square miles (8,500 km 2), and the West Desert Pumping Project was established to mitigate flooding by pumping water from the lake into the nearby desert. The area of the lake can fluctuate substantially due to its low average depth of 16 feet (4.9 m). It is a remnant of Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric body of water that covered much of western Utah. state of Utah and has a substantial impact upon the local climate, particularly through lake-effect snow. The Great Salt Lake ( Shoshone: Ti'tsa-pa “Bad Water” ) is the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere and the eighth-largest terminal lake in the world.
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