I just read in the Deseret News about how the Great Salt Lake is drying out, so much that even Trump is posting about it.

Just so you know, this isn't a surprize to anyone. Anyone paying attention, anyway.

Most articles complain primarily how it's the drought this year causing it. No one-year diminution of snowfall can cause the Salt Lake to dry. That's a decadal event.

And what is that decadal event?

NSA + Facebook. Both of them built huge data centers between Utah Lake and the Great Salt Lake about ten years ago. When they approval process for both of them was underway, there was talk about electricity, and jobs, and infresctructure, but nary a word about water. 

Data centers use huge amounts of water for the cooling. Most older datacenters run about 60 F or lower to keep the electronics in better shape. And the data center is filled with air-cooled racks that run about 60 KW per rack of computers. The entire thing runs mostly as a 1 GW heater that needs to run at 60 F. The two biggest parts of the datacenter building, other than the computers, is the electrical distribution and the cooling. Networking is minor compared to those two.

And how is water used there? To cool the condensers of the refridgeration system. Heat is pumped out of the air supply into cooling radiators. In your AC system at home the amount of heat is in the 3 KW range, so air is quite enough (it heats up about 30 F as it passes over the condener fins).

But how big are those condenser fins when you get rid of a million KW of heat? Bigger then you can make them. So they wash water over the fins to let evaporation take away the bulk of the heat. Typically more than 10 million gallons a day go into the air. And where did that 10 million gallons of water come from? It was part of the approval process, a part that was never mentioned when the process was underway. Discussion revolves around electricity when the approval process is underway.

If the folks in charge had said, "To keep the datacenter cooled we will need over 10 million gallons a day of water, and that's going to diminish the level of the Great Salt Lake significantly, so much that two of these datacenters will make you worry about drying the lake entirely, but it takes three or four datacenters to dry it completely, is that still okay with you?" thimgs might have taken a different course. It's obvious that they were going to use water, and that water is a limited resource in Utah, but no one seemed to care at the time. Oh well. 

From an economic poiont of view what's happening now is a good outcome: the water is going to evaporate wither way, in a cooling bay at the NSA datacenter, or on the lake, and the state benefits economically far more when it's happening at the datacenter. That's probably what the state leaders were thinking when this went through and why they didn't mention it to anyone. It's called "hypobole," pronounced "HYPO-bow-lee," to deliberatly understate things. More datacenters are being proposed all over Utah. South Provo, Delta, Fillmore (not a datacenter, but a campus of datacenters).

So yes, the Great Salt Lake is running dry. It's part of the plan. Some decades will be worst than others. 

The odd thing is that there is now a group running around telling everyone how bad a dry lakebed will be. They use hyperbole, to deliberately overstate things. Like killer dust storms. They really just want your money, like the state leaders did before them.

It's all politics. Or scandal.

But whatever it is, it's not a surprise.