Stewards of our planet, failing again.
[Wheel of transformation]
The Great Salt Lake is so briny that swimmers bob in the water like corks. It is teeming with tiny shrimp that were sold for years in the back of comic books as magical “sea monkeys.” And, for reasons scientists cannot explain, it is laden with toxic mercury.
“We’ve got a problem, but we don’t know how big it is,” said Chris Cline, a biologist for the federal Fish and Wildlife Service who has been collecting the eggs of cinnamon teal ducks from nests along the rim of the lake so that they can be cracked open and analyzed in the laboratory.
Three years ago, in an alarming finding, tests by the federal Geological Survey showed the lake had some of the highest mercury readings ever recorded in a body of water in the United States.
…
Researchers say mercury released into the atmosphere from coal-fired power plants in the West, gold mines in Nevada, volcanoes in Indonesia or industries in rapidly developing countries such as China or India may be settling in the lake.
[From Studying Great Salt Lake’s High Mercury Levels – NYTimes.com]
Let us speculate: man-made pollution from coal plants, or some unknown natural phenomenon? What are the odds? My money is on coal plants, whether locally, or elsewhere.