#water levels

7 May 2026

The Great Salt Lake is drying up and the Republican government of Utah is doing little to save it. They constantly cave to the usual groups: agricultural interests, mining, homeowners who like spacious lawns in an arid region, and big industry.

The largest saltwater lake in the western hemisphere has been steadily shrinking, as more and more water has been diverted away from the lake to irrigate farmland, feed industry and water lawns. A megadrought across the US south-west, accelerated by global heating, has hastened the lake’s demise. Unless dire action is taken, the lake could decline beyond recognition within five years, a report published early this year warned, exposing a dusty lakebed laced with arsenic, mercury, lead and other toxic substances.The resulting toxic dustbowl would be “one of the worst environmental disasters in modern US history”, the ecologist Ben Abbott of Brigham Young University told the Guardian earlier this year. Despite such warnings, officials have failed to take serious action, local groups said in their lawsuit, which was filed on Wednesday. “We are trying to avert disaster. We are trying to force the hand of state government to take serious action,” said Brian Moench of the Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, one of the groups suing state agencies. “Plaintiffs pray that this Court declare that the State of Utah has breached its trust duty to ensure water flows into the Great Salt Lake sufficient to maintain the Lake,” reads the lawsuit, which was brought by coalition that includes Earthjustice, the Utah Rivers Council, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club, among others.

Political pressure has not been very effective in a state dominated by Republicans. The state's response is lukewarm at best. That's in addition to bizarre proposals.

The state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, has suspended new claims to water in the Great Salt Lake basin and appointed a commissioner to oversee response to the lake crisis. Last year, Utah’s legislature passed several conservation measures, including a $40m trust to support lake preservation projects. But Abbott and his colleagues, who authored a sobering report on the lake in January, found that those measures increased flows to the lake by just 100,000 acre feet in 2022. About 2.5m acre-feet a year of water will need to flow into the lake to bring it to a healthy level, the researchers estimated. That water will likely have to come at the expense of agriculture, which takes in about three-quarters of the water diverted away from the lake to grow mostly alfalfa and hay. Cities and mineral extraction operations each take up another 9% of diverted water. But wresting water away from agriculture is politically complicated. Officials have explored propositions to pay farmers to fallow land and use less water, though such proposals have yet to gain much tractions. Lawmakers have also offered up a series of out-of-the-box solutions – including cloud seeding, which uses chemicals to prompt more precipitation – or building a giant pipeline from the Pacific Ocean.

Seriously, a pipeline from the Pacific Ocean? This is a classic idiotic GOP way to deal with an environmental catastrophe which doesn't get to the root of the problem.

Already, the lake has lost 73% of its water and 60% of its surface area, and is becoming saltier, threatening native flies and brine shrimp. A diminished lake may be unable to support the more than 10 million migratory birds that stop over in the region. A white pelican colony recently abandoned a nesting site on the lake, potentially due to declining water levels. “In addition to the millions of people who live here, so many plants and animals depend on the lake,” said Deeda Seed, Utah campaigner at the Center for Biological Diversity. “The health of northern Utah’s entire population depends on the Great Salt Lake’s survival and I hope this lawsuit can help save it.”

^^^ emphasis added

Knowledge of the Depths

Season 5 Featured on: The SiIvaGunner Spooktacular Halloween Horror Special: Curse of the Fallen Angel

Ripped by Heboyi

Requested by an anonymous reader!

There are a couple of water levels in that game. They're a tangled mess of brightly-coloured coral corridors, teeming with dangerous enemies like spiked urchins, hungry piranhas and salvos of swift barracudas. You can't fight these enemies for much of these levels, so you have to tread (water) carefully around them.

And while you're doing this, the track Water World is playing. Now, everyone loves Aquatic Ambience, the track that plays in DKC1's water levels, and for good reason - it's a serene, mysterious and beautiful piece of music that captures the experience of swimming through pristine waters. But Water World takes a slightly different approach - while still calming and pretty to listen to, there's this undercurrent of... dread, I want to say, that accompanies it. This disconcerting sense that you are lost, you are alone, and you should not be here. As pretty as this world is, it is not yours to exist in. There are aspects to it that are fundamentally unknowable to surface dwellers. And if you were to perish, that world would swallow you up in an instant. No-one would mourn you down here.

And then, AND THEN, you get to the end of the level, and you emerge in this small cavern. Because of how DKC3's levels work, you have to be on dry land to grab the flagpole and clear the stage, so from that perspective it makes sense. But tiny babby me did not see it that way. Consider that for these levels, the general direction you go is right and down - as in, descending deeper beneath the surface of the ocean. So you dive right down, maybe even to the ocean floor, and here's this cave you can stand up and walk around in. This tiny little space, at the BOTTOM OF THE OCEAN, with this absolutely haunting piece of music playing the entire time, and just for a moment you go, "Why did I come here? How do I get out?" and then it occurs to you that you don't know why or how, and that maybe, since the game has guided you down here, this is where you're supposed to be. In a small cave, at the bottom of the ocean. Forever.

And then you grab the goal flag and you move to the next level.

But let me tell you something - that entire sequence MESSED ME UP as a kid. As terrifying as the notion was, it was also strangely beautiful to me, in a way that I couldn't explain then, and still can't quite explain now. I genuinely believe that experience has likely shaped a good deal of what I enjoy in certain media - things like a sense of futilty, of small secret places you want to enter knowing you can never leave, of leaving this world entirely for something smaller, safer.

...

Have Felix in Labyrinth for Christmas!

I honestly love this melody. Yes, really! XD Just like Felix's pose while catching the bubble, I wanted to make it look as silly as possible 😂 Can't wait for the rest of the events of this long scene!

🎁🎄🎁 Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all! 🎁🎄🎁