Yellowstone Park has severe flooding while about 200 miles away, the Great Salt Lake is drying up.

[Towlie]

Parts of Yellowstone National Park may stay closed for 'substantial length of time' after severe flooding

As the Great Salt Lake Dries Up, Utah Faces An ‘Environmental Nuclear Bomb’

Any ideas?

[Harvey Wineburger]

1. Maybe it's not global?

IDK.

[Voltaire2]

5. Maybe different regions have different local climates?

[maxsolomon]

2. No, because they do not share a drainage basin.

Yellowstone River goes north, then east into the Missouri & Mississippi eventually.

GSL is drying up because 1. there is an extended drought in a desert that always had limited water resources, and 2. the Wasatch basin is being sucked dry by people.

The Government of the Beehive State, and the Mormons that control it, are not exactly focused on Environmental Stewardship. It's not like the GSL is really good for much up to this point, except apparently holding down all the toxic minerals in the lakebed.

[mopinko]

3. i hope someone is analyzing that dust.

maybe it's useable.

[maxsolomon]

4. mining the lakebed of the GSL is already a thing

https://www.standard.net/news/environment/2016/may/01/mineral-extraction-on-great-salt-lake-has-local-national-and-global-impact/

[VGNonly]

7. Another problem with GSL

Less water in the lake means less snowfall. Salt Lake City relies on creek flow for much of their water supply. The creeks could dry up.

[ripcord]

9. Whenever I hear about the Great Salt Lake level

I always think about the Owens Lake ecological disaster caused when Los Angeles drained the lake for drinking water.

[Eugene]

6. Great Salt Lake's input water is diverted.

Yellowstone flooding is a transient event. The long term trend is drought.

[Quixote1818]

8. Looking at rainfall the past week, it was a very localized high amount hitting mostly the northern

part of Yellowstone. The north end of the park received between 4 to 6 inches which also melted a crapload of snow in the higher elevations. Northern Utah only got about a half an inch this week. Also, the drought issue for the Great Salt Lake is years in the making. Even if they had 5 to 6 inches in a week, that might only increase lake levels a foot or two.

https://water.weather.gov/precip/

Even after all that rain in a few days, Yellowstone is still in a long-term drought according to the drought map but it may be taken off once the map is updated in a week or two: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/

[hunter]

10. They know what they'll eventually have to do, they just don't like it.

Agriculture in these upper desert basins is pretty much doomed. For the Mormons this will be a huge blow to their religious identity and mythology.

There are ways to control the dust, but first you have to admit there's a problem and be willing to spend the money.

Humans are pretty bad at that sort of thing. We all know we have to quit fossil fuels, for example, but we don't.