Rising from dead and dying lakes, western dust storms menace species, drivers, and public health

Trouble ahead A dust storm crosses the Mojave desert in Nevada in a 2013 photo. Rajiv Bhattan via Flickr

By Felicity Barringer

Weird, milky rain started falling in Spokane in eastern Washington in February, 2015. The same kind of rain covered cars in Boise, Idaho with white crust two years ago. 

The same substance that made the rain milky caused a 23-car pileup this summer on 1-25 north of Albuquerque that sent 18 people to the hospital, an eight-car accident killing seven people at the Lordsburg playa in southwestern New Mexico a decade ago, and a 22-car pileup on I-10 northwest of Tucson, Arizona that left three people dead in 2015. 

What is it? Dust. The legacy of the earth’s history and humankind’s, dust has become an increasingly dangerous element of western life. What is dust? “Dust is…both solid and insubstantial, an element as much of air as it is of earth… matter at the very limit-point of formlessness, the closest ‘stuff’ gets to nothing,” wrote the British author Jay Owens in “Dust, the Modern World in a Trillion Particles,” her new book. 

Dust storms have been part of life in the Great Basin for millennia, but there has been a pronounced change in their frequency. Newer western dust storms are the byproduct of both water diversions and climate change.

Their harm isn’t distributed evenhandedly: a new scientific report shows that poorer neighborhoods of Salt Lake City suffer disproportionately. Dust from the relentlessly disappearing Salton Sea has been pinpointed as the source of asthma among poorer residents living nearby in California’s Imperial Valley. It is linked to emphysema and coronary ailments suffered by tribal members in the Owens Valley in the eastern Sierra.

Worries about dust’s impacts and constraints on research

A cohort of environmental and medical researchers studying the chemistry, meteorology, and health impacts of dust in the West are alarmed and frustrated. Alarmed by the harm it causes people and ecosystems. Frustrated by the lack of the analytical resources – from sufficient monitors to sufficient funds – to get their arms around the issue and find solutions. They believe dust problems are getting worse, but lack definitive data. Monitors detecting small particulate matter are concentrated in urban areas or near national parks.

“We don’t have air quality monitors in the right places and don’t have them measuring the right things,“ said Bonnie Baxter, a faculty member at Westminster University in Utah. 

Or, as three researchers from Texas Tech, the University of Colorado, and Colorado State said in an American Geophysical Union paper last December, “it is clear … that the spatial gaps between and within monitoring networks are limiting our knowledge of dust impacts on air quality.”

“We don’t have air quality monitors in the right places and don’t have them measuring the right things.”

Bonnie Baxter, Westminster University

“I use a dust storm that happened maybe two years ago as an example,” said Thomas E. Gill, a professor of Earth, Environmental and Resource Sciences at the University of Texas El Paso. “It started out in southeast Colorado – you could see it from a satellite. Went across the heart of the dust bowl – Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas. It went down the Texas panhandle. Ultimately it dumped into the Gulf of Mexico. But from the point of view of air quality monitoring and sensing, it didn’t exist.”

He continued: “people in rural areas and smaller cities were definitely exposed. We don’t have a handle on dust as an air-quality issue in most of the dusty areas – that’s a real unmet need,” added Gill.“We can make estimates and guesses by looking at them from satellites – but [cloud cover means] a lot of dust storms are hidden.”

Still, a group of scientists did determine last year that, between 2007 and 2017, dust killed 232 people in the U.S. Their report noted: “the largest single location of fatal crashes was a segment of Interstate 10 in southwestern New Mexico, near the border to Arizona. In this hotspot, Interstate 10 crosses the Lordsburg Playa, where dust plumes caused fatal pileups with increasing frequency in the last decade. The “Deadliest 10 Miles” on I-10 near Picacho Peak between Phoenix and Tucson… [have] been ranked as one of the most dangerous highway stretches in the nation. Between 2010 and 2015, 85 dust-related crashes were reported in this area.” 

Gill, who has specialized in dust research for three decades, said researchers are now working to quantify dust’s myriad impacts on the West.

Drying saline lakes are a prime source of dust

While studies of dust’s impact are ongoing, the question researchers have been wrestling with for three decades is what to do about it. First they must identify where the dust originates and what’s in it. 

The bulk of this research has been done as part of multi-pronged efforts to mitigate dust storms caused by the loss of Owens Lake. For decades, storms of fine dust gave this area the worst air quality in the nation. After its water was sent by aqueduct to Los Angeles starting in 1913, the region was transformed into desiccated saline land pummeled by dust storms containing nickel, cadmium and arsenic.

The Owens Valley story was a harbinger of what would happen around the Great Basin, where there are 19 other terminal lakes, disappearing or gone, ranging from Utah’s Great Salt Lake to the Salton Sea to California’s Mono Lake to the Carson Sink in Nevada and the small lakes of Oregon – Lake Abert, Malheur Lake and Summer Lake – to Utah’s mostly dry Lake Sevier. Most are remnants of two huge prehistoric salt water bodies, Lake Bonneville and Lake Lahontan. The largest is the Great Salt Lake, whose slow disappearance over 20 years accelerated alarmingly in 2022.

“I’ve lived in Utah for 22 years. The dust has gotten worse.”

Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah

“A lot of these saline lakes are already dead,” said Kevin Perry, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Utah. “The Great Salt Lake is still vibrant,” he added. Then he sighed. “In the fall of 2022 I thought it was going to die.” A 22-year mega-drought had uncovered 800 square miles of new shore. Lake levels are now up more than 6.5 feet, thanks to two wet seasons and local conservation efforts. But the drought persists. 

Perry fears that the lake’s reprieve will lead to complacency, postponing difficult solutions, including cutting back water diversions for agriculture. “There’s complacency,” he said. “We’re like the frog in the slowly boiling pot. The smoke we’re getting, the dust we’re getting – we’re getting used to it….” 

He concluded: “I’ve lived in Utah for 22 years. The dust has gotten worse.” Quoted in Popular Science magazine, he estimates the Salt Lake City region is hit by 10 to 15 dust storms a year from Great Salt Lake, up from none 15 years ago.In 2022, as Great Salt Lake reached its lowest recorded level, Congress passed and President Biden signed a $25 million bill tasking the U.S. Geological Survey with assessing, monitoring, and conserving saline lake ecosystems and wildlife – predominantly migrating birds – that depends on them. It supplements a $10 million Army Corps of Engineers grant.

What’s causing the dust and what’s in it

“The hottest spots for dust are the lakes that are drying up, usually as a result of the human thirst for water,” said Gill. 

And, as Bonnie Baxter said,“Terminal lakes have the memory of everything they’ve encountered because only the water evaporates. Everything introduced into that watershed ends up in that basin.” Researchers examining the uncovered shores of the Great Salt Lake in 2022 found arsenic and copper.

“The hottest spots for dust are the lakes that are drying up, usually as a result of the human thirst for water.”

Thomas E. Gill, University of Texas at El Paso

The milky rain in Spokane and Boise? It was generated from strong winds that lifted up material from the desiccated shores of Summer Lake in south-central Oregon and blew it 100 miles away. The dust was heavily saline, but carried no industrial chemicals. At another moment, saline dust from Lake Abert, another terminal lake in Oregon, has blown 85 miles. 

“Why are these lakes drying out?,” asked Ron Larson, the author of a history of Lake Abert. “The answer is complicated. With Lake Abert… it’s upstream water diversions and climate change. All these lakes, almost every one of the terminal lakes in the western U.S. suffer from that combination.”

If the precise contribution of these two factors may be unclear, the effect is not. A 2022 briefing paper released by Brigham Young University found, “Dried lake beds can erase air quality improvements that took decades to achieve. Increased dust deposition in the watershed can also damage agricultural crops, degrade soil fertility, and cause premature snowmelt when deposited on snowpack.” When the snowmelt runoff becomes harder to capture, the danger of drought is compounded.

Maura Hahnenberger, of Salt Lake Community College, and the University of Utah’s Kevin Perry said in the abstract of their 2015 paper on Utah’s Sevier Lake, “Dust from this source, containing elevated levels of potentially hazardous elements, degrades air quality in the Salt Lake City metropolitan area… and is deposited in the alpine ecosystems of the Wasatch Mountains.”

In 2022, Baxter co-authored a tribute to Great Salt Lake, in the form of a tongue-in-cheek obituary of the lake and its relatives around the West.

The impact of saline lakes’ disappearance on human and ecosystem health

Early heralds of the disappearance of saline lakes were bird lovers; in 2017 the Audubon Society published its “Water Birds and the Arid West” report, saying “Western saline lakes function as a network of critical habitats. Each is a vital link on migratory pathways from winter to breeding grounds and back again. But throughout the West, saline lakes are drying up at an alarming rate….”

“…throughout the West, saline lakes are drying up at an alarming rate….”

Audubon Society Water Birds and the Arid West report

The impact of dust lifted from the lake beds on people’s health has only been studied episodically until recently. James Crooks, a researcher at National Jewish Health in Denver, said, “a paper by a well-known researcher that came out in the late 90s looked at dust and mortality and didn’t find anything.” That 1999 study concluded: “coarse particles from windblown dust are not associated with mortality risk.” 

“That paper killed interest in [dust] for a long time,” Crooks said. So, he added, “I think the only aspect of dust and harm to health [noticed now] is low-visibility driving on highways…. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.” In 2016, Crooks co-authored a paper that found, “Dust storms are associated with increases in lagged non-accidental and cardiovascular mortality.” Dust caused hospital visits for lung or coronary problems days after dust storms. 

“Anything that’s stuck in your lung is going to cause problems,” Crooks said in an interview.

Last year, Gill, Daniel Q. Tong, a professor of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Earth Sciences at Virginia’s George Mason University, and three other scientists authored a paper about dust storms and mortality. It found “in most years, dust events caused comparable life losses to that from other weather hazards such as hurricanes, thunderstorms, lightning, and wildfires.” 

While Crooks looks at dust contributions to cardiovascular and pulmonary health, Tong’s research focuses on dust storms’ relation to the rise in infections with the fungal disease Valley Fever, a soil-borne ailment which is endemic to California’s Central Valley and the Phoenix area, but is spreading around southern New Mexico and southwest Texas. Dust’s disparate impacts have fragmented the various groups trying to solve dust-related problems. To remedy this, Tong, Gill, and other colleagues, formed the Dust Alliance of North America,  as a center for sharing information and solutions.

Dust control lessons from Owens Lake

Efforts to solve the problems caused by the disappearance of the 100-square-mile Owens Lake has, for three decades, have made the eastern Sierra the epicenter of experiments to find ways to keep dust down. 

Under the eye of federal and state regulators, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is paying – more than $2.5 billion to date – to undo the harm done by its century-old diversion of Owens Lake’s feeder streams. Their experiments – with gravel, salt-loving plants, and a thin cover of water over the lake bed making it an ersatz wetland – have almost ended air pollution that was once the nation’s worst.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is paying – more than $2.5 billion to date – to undo the harm done by its century-old diversion of Owens Lake’s feeder streams.

“At this point in time, we believe we control about 98 to 99 percent of the emissions,” Phill Kiddoo, who heads the Great Basin Unified Air Control District, told Jay Owens, the author of “Dust,” Once, Kiddoo added, PM10 levels around the Owens lake bed would be “one hundred times the regulatory limit.” His district, a joint agency of Alpine, Mono and Inyo Counties, must ensure air-quality standards are met over a 1,400-square-mile area.

In 1998, the city of Los Angeles, after years of resistance, agreed to meet the air district’s demands to isolate dust hot spots and implement expensive dust control measures to end particulate-matter pollution that far exceeded EPA limits. Gill noted wryly: “Owens Lake has become a multibillion-dollar playground for engineers with new tests for dust-suppression techniques – applying what we consider to be the best practices.”

The successes at Owens Lake may provide a roadmap for dealing with the problems now faced by Great Salt Lake and other saline lakes.  But it is not clear that the dust coming from sources other than terminal lakes can be tamed.

Drying lakes are not the sole source of harmful dust

What other sources? The fields where farmers once planted vegetables, hay and nut trees. When farmers no longer get enough water, they let fields go fallow. Landscapes destroyed by wildfires become sources of new dust storms. As Gill said, “After they burn, they can leave the land barren. Those areas become the biggest source of dust. One of our biggest recent dust storms came from land that had been scarred by Milford Flat Fire,” a 2007 blaze in west-central Utah.

Dust sources far from saline lakes’ playas make highways dangerous. “Drivers on I-10 are not from dust country. They may never have been in a dust storm. They are traveling at 70 miles per hour and boom they’re in a white-out of dust,” said Gill. A dangerous stretch of I-10 “is very close to the border of Arizona and New Mexico,” he said, adding that “both states have poured millions of dollars into trying to find solutions,” identifying the worst dust spots and planting new vegetation or spreading gravel.

The Arizona Department of Transportation put a $65 million high-tech dust detection system using both 13 ground sensors and Doppler radar online in 2021. The agency reports that, using its sensors and speed-limit signs on a 10-mile stretch of highway plagued by dust storms, there have been dozens of dust alerts to motorists.

As some existing dust sources are controlled, new ones develop. More farm fields are being fallowed, and more cases of Valley Fever are being reported. A research project to speed the development of bacteria-based soil crusts to hold the dust in place is one of several projects at three Arizona universities the Board of Regents funded with a $4.5 million grant. 

Ferran Garcia-Pichel, a microbiologist and Regents’ Professor in Arizona State University’s School of Life Sciences, believes that the state’s water shortage means “more and more lands going fallow. Those will eventually develop crusts. But it will take 40 to 50 years…. In these 50 years they will become a source of dust.”

He hopes to stabilize the soil and speed the development of the crust by inoculating the soil with crust-forming bacteria – the equivalent, at a microscopic level, of reforestation. “So we thought of a couple of alternatives to use – chemically-based approaches to stabilize the soil and a biological long-term, natural approach to enhance the process of recovery.” Although he has been working on crust-forming processes for 15 years, he is trying out his current speed-up-the-crust experiment on acre-sized farm plots; its long-term prospects are uncertain.

“Flying under the radar” – or clouds,  dust storms can evade satellite detection

If ground-level sensors can help as a dust storm hits, could satellites’ broad views predict a dust storm’s path? Kevin Perry at the University of Utah said that cloud cover often makes that impossible. “Dust is a tricky one here in Utah. A lot of our storms are associated with cold fronts and clouds associated with it. That makes it darn near impossible to do an accounting with satellites,” he said.

But sometimes satellites have a clear view of an approaching haboob – Arizona’s massive desert dust storms driven by strong winds, whose name in Arabic means “to blow.” Haboobs appear most frequently in southern Arizona and western Texas. A 2017 Pulmonary Chronicles article noted, “These storms are rare – only about 4.3 percent of total blowing dust events, but are dangerous to the potential health of the inhabitants due to the reduced lead-time for forecasting and heavy concentration of particulate matter….”

“There is a real urgency to do something about it.”

Kevin Perry, University of Utah

Does the changing climate and increasing land disturbances creating dust hot spots mean another Dust Bowl is ahead? “One of the questions I always get is ‘Will there be another dust bowl?’” said Gill. “My answer: probably not, but not for sure. I would not put it in terms of another dust bowl, but a lot of projections [Indicate that] … dust is going to increase and spread over the Great Plains,” he said.

“I’m seeing it indirectly in the Great Basin, too,” he continued. “The thirst for water and agricultural demand are a large portion of what’s going on in Utah. Then there’s abandoned agricultural land in Arizona and the looming prospect of that in the San Joaquin Valley.”

The December, 2023 paper for the American Geophysical Union concluded, “Recent studies suggest that dust loading will increase due to climate change … but without additional data, we are limited in our ability to fully characterize its impacts on air quality and therefore on health.”

“Why don’t we have a sense of urgency?” Perry asked. “I don’t know if it’s scientists not communicating risk effectively. There is a real urgency to do something about it.”

 

 

Edited by Geoff McGhee.