Do we really want to pipe water in from California? Not all of the ideas to save the Great Salt Lake are good ones.

• Author: Beers, Heather

YOU'VE PROBABLY HEARD by now, but the Great Salt Lake is drying up. The lake reached record lows this summer, dropping to 4,190.1 feet in July. To put this in perspective, the lake was flexing about 3,000 square miles in the 90s. Now, it's withered to less than 1,000.

There are some obvious things we can do about this, mostly on the agricultural side of things. But that won't stop people from coming up with all kinds of cooky, less obvious ways we could save it, like making fake rain in the desert or piping in water from California, among other ideas.

"We had 100 businesses in the room today [at a Salt Lake Chamber meeting] talking about the Great Salt Lake," says Ginger Chinn, Salt Lake Chamber VP of public policy and government affairs. "It's now more and more dire. We're discussing how it will impact tourism, outdoor recreation, business recruitment-we feel like every idea needs to be put on the table."

One of those ideas is called cloud seeding, a.k.a. making it rain (or snow). The Utah Division of Water Resources explains it this way: "Ground-based seeders shoot silver iodide into winter clouds where it helps form ice crystals. The seeders are placed along foothills and higher elevations where the release of the cloud seeds is timed so that air currents carry them high into the cloud."

In other words, cloud seeding can make snowstorms more productive, leading to more snowfall than under natural conditions.

Analysis by the organization shows that cloud seeding can increase precipitation by 5 to 15 percent in seeded areas. "We try to target areas where it's most helpful," says Jake Serago, water resource engineer and cloud seeding program coordinator for the Utah Division of Water Resources. "The major central and southern areas of the state, we've been seeding there since the 50s. In 2018, Salt Lake City reached out to us and said they want to participate and cloud seed the Wasatch Front."

If the state has been cloud seeding since the 1950s, it's proven effective at raising precipitation levels that impact our waterways, and studies show there are no harmful environmental effects, what's the hold-up? Why hasn't Utah already begun cloud seeding areas that could more directly impact water levels at the Great Salt Lake?

Serago says it comes down to money. The organization's budget has historically been limited to around $350,000 per year, requiring the need for co-sponsors such as municipalities who can support any seeding activity. "Up...