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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