For the past five decades a succession of companies has held the license to operate the big mine across the highway. During the summer dry season the brine evaporates and its minerals percolate up to the surface, adding to the crust’s mass.Īt least it is supposed to work that way. This brine floods the surface of the ancient basin and collects in a shallow aquifer. Today the crust is replenished naturally by winter rains, which carry minerals-including potash and halite (aka rock salt)-from the watershed. As the water evaporated over millennia, a thick layer of salt remained on the lakebed. The flats formed 17,000 years ago as a vast saline lake. “We’re measuring in inches now,” says Stuart Gosswein, a spokesman for Save The Salt, a coalition of racing companies and fans. The alarming signs have convinced the government, the mining company and the racing community to take action. The 20-kilometer-long racetrack has crumbled to 12 kilometers and the central basin, where salt is thickest, has degraded from a depth of 1.5 meters to 30 centimeters. Extreme storms, like last winter’s heavier-than-usual rains, have swept in from the surrounding watershed and dissolved the hard, salty surface into a muddy slush. A large potash mine, just across Interstate 80 and south of the raceway, has drawn brine away from the aquifer under the salt flat for decades. The unwelcome decision put the 115-square-kilometer salt flats’ vulnerability in sharp relief. Without a firm track, organizers were forced to cancel Bonneville Speed Week, a major racing tournament, for the second consecutive year. This year its normally rock-hard crust looked like gray, gritty soup. Now the sprawling salt pan, about 185 kilometers west of Salt Lake City, is in trouble.
Land speed records have been made and broken on its lunarlike surface for more than a century. Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats are an iconic setting for car commercials and feature films.
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