An astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) took this photo of an eastern section of the Great Salt Flat as it traveled over northern Utah. Water and sediment flow from Bear River Bay past salt marshes into the Great Salt Lake. These colorful salt flats are located between the Promontory Mountains and an industrial area to the east. Much of the light area next to the salt pans has dried.
Solar evaporation ponds, named for the mineral extraction method, are key to the industry in this area. These shallow, man-made salt pans slowly evaporate water, crystallize minerals, and make it easy for them to bulldoz, collect, and process for sale. The color of each salt pan ranges from blue and green to orange and red and depends on the concentrations of salt, bacteria and algae. In general, blue colored ponds have lower salinity than red or orange ponds.
The second image captured by Landsat 5 shows the same location in July 1985. The Great Salt Lake catchment areas experienced unusually high levels of rainfall in the early 1980s, causing the lake to rise to its historic high water level of 1,284 feet (4,211 feet) compared to the Astronaut photo, the Great Salt Lake was about 5 meters higher at that time, and many salt marshes were blue-green in color, indicating lower salinity and higher water levels. Due to years of drought and increasing human water consumption, the Great Salt Lake has seen significant water declines since then, leading to increased exposure of lake beds.
The astronaut photo ISS063-E-40184 was taken on July 5, 2020 with a Nikon D5 digital camera with an 800 millimeter lens and is available from the ISS Crew Earth Observations Facility and the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit of the Johnson Space Center posed. The picture was taken by a member of the Expedition 63 crew. The image has been cropped and enhanced to improve contrast, and lens artifacts have been removed. The International Space Station Program supports the laboratory, as part of the ISS National Lab, in helping astronauts capture images of the earth that are of greatest value to scientists and the general public and make those images freely available on the Internet. You can find more pictures of astronauts and cosmonauts in the NASA/ JSC Gateway to astronaut photography of the earth. Caption by Sara Schmidt, GeoControl Systems, JETS contract with NASA-JSC. NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin using Landsat data from the US Geological Survey.