- The Great Salt Lake Institute at Westminster College connects people to the Great Salt Lake using research and education.

- This is one of the largest watersheds in North America.

There are 10 million birds that come to this lake and the bird life is phenomenal.

It is probably a place where I've experienced like this perfect solitude and these birds are all over the water flying overhead and that's the only noise you hear.

It has so many personal holds on me but also professional holds.

I've been so interested in the things that I see and it drives my science.

So I, myself, I think I'm woven into this place.

I can't tell you how many different sorts of interactions I've had with this water and with students and with scientists and with artists and with writers and poets.

And it just brings out the best in everybody and this sense of community, and I love this place.

You think we should try to isolate DNA from those?

- For sure.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, they look good.

- My first entree into lake research was really about how extreme life survives on this planet in an environment that is high sunlight, but they somehow don't get mutations like we do or how they could live in high salt but their cells don't shrivel up like ours would.

I wanted to understand how they do life and think about how that might tell us more about life on other planets.

It's funny how they're not very, that one's green.

And what happened is nobody had done the foundational work on the microorganisms at this lake.

And I think feeling that void of knowledge was really what drove me to start Great Salt Lake Institute.

A hub for everything Great Salt Lake.

We really like to think of ourselves as interdisciplinary, collaborative, synergistic, anything we can do to get more attention on the lake.

And so you see those kind of brown streaks?

- Yes.

- Those are brine fly pupal casings when the brine flies were doing well.

And so today we are working with a team studying the astrobiology of Great Salt Lake.

- This is a great place to study because Mars used to be a watery world, and then as the water evaporated, you had it becoming more and more salty formation of evaporate crystals.

And so by studying the ecosystem here, we get an idea of what might have happened on Mars as it lost its water.

- Since the time that we have been recording history in written documents no one has ever seen the lake this low.

This system is so deficient in water, the groundwater underneath that we're not restoring it when we have a good water year.

So we're in this mega drought and we are experiencing warmer temperatures.

We've done, been diverting water here in the valley for about a century.

That has not set us up to be able to handle the climate conditions we're experiencing right now.

We're really set up for failure and not set up for success.

This is really shocking.

Just like a week ago, this was water.

Two things are going on that there's the shrinking of the lake, so the exposure of the foundation of the system right here.

That's one thing that's happening but then the water becomes too salty for life to handle it.

So that's the second thing that's happening.

So the South Arm is shrinking and it's getting saltier and saltier and saltier.

Right now it's at 19%.

It should be like between 12 and 15.

So the brine shrimp and the brine fly they like to be between 12 and 15, that's a happy place.

The brine flies are dying in multitudes right now, and the brine shrimp the ecological models say they can only really be this productive for about two years before this high salinity starts to impact their reproduction.

So we might see less brine shrimp in the lake.

The birds that eat the flies have nothing to eat and the birds that eat the shrimp, they're gonna start finding them smaller and less nutritious.

So we're standing on microbialite structures right now.

I've been studying these microbialites and the microbes that make them for the last decade or so and I'm really interested in them but also very sad about the state of affairs with them.

So microbialite is literally a rock made by microbes and so they're kind of the bottom of the ecosystem and brine flies and brine shrimp can eat these things and then they feed the birds.

So they're really, really important.

And the ones on the bottom of this lake could be thousands of years old.

These structures have been growing and feeding this ecosystem.

It's just been thriving like this for 13,000 years so it's kind of hard to see it struggling right now.

- So the idea here was to watch a water evaporate.

- My research students are working on, I think one of the most critical problems in the lake right now.

And it is asking a question about resiliency.

- But in the middle we have like some green.

- Yeah, I see.

- Yeah.

- What if the lake is low for a couple years and these microbialites are exposed to air and they dry out and they die?

Do these microbes have the ability to go into some kind of dormancy in a way that in a couple years if we could bring the volume back up of the lake, would they resuscitate and start coming back to life?

They are holding up and this makes me hopeful that they can handle drying up.

- It feels so rewarding when things go right when you see the microbialites in your own lab in a simple model grow and recover and rebound.

It shows that there is some resilience.

If the lake gets more water, we might see a recovery.

- We're totally at a tipping point.

We're like standing on a precipice right now.

Now is the time to shout from the mountaintop that we need water in this lake.

And I go to meetings with the state agency scientists who are working so hard on understanding the system and pulling together all of the best people and the best ideas, I get hopeful.

When you spend your life with young people, it's really important to keep that optimism.

And they keep me optimistic.

They keep me on my toes because they care and they wanna do good work in the world.

That just keeps you driving forward.