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United States Science

Low Levels Expose Mysterious Objects In Salt Lake 45

Posted by timothy from the folk-of-the-fringe dept.
nilbog writes "KSL TV Reports that record setting low levels in the Great Salt Lake have revealed some mysterious objects (not to mention nearly 1,000 square miles of new 4 wheel drive terrain). One item is even described as a bomb, and many items are still unidentified. A lot of the waste is thought to be from a nearby airforce base and might even be dangerous. Hey, might be a good place to acquire materials for your next backyard project!"
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Low Levels Expose Mysterious Objects In Salt Lake More

Low Levels Expose Mysterious Objects In Salt Lake

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  • In other news... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @10:42AM (#8714306)
    One of the mysterious objects has just been identified as a Mr. James Hoffa.

  • Mysterious? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by black mariah ( 654971 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @10:43AM (#8714329)
    It's just a bunch of junk. Nothing very mysterious. I was expecting jade pyramids and slate monoliths, not a '78 Pinto. :\

  • What about the lake's eco-system? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by shiwala ( 93327 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @10:51AM (#8714424)
    That's great that people have more room to play, but what is this doing to the lake's eco-system? Granted, not many fish call it their home, but there are lots of brine shrimp there which in turn are food for other animals.

  • Have they found... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @11:39AM (#8715017)
    the golden tablets yet?

    they gotta be there somewhere...

  • Nice... (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Patrik_AKA_RedX ( 624423 )
    Great! They found some old scrap metal in a dry lake and it's already news. Now if they had found Atlantis, Nessie or Bigfoot in there, it would be worth the bits. But old scrap metal?
    Slow news day al over again.

  • The "Bomb" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Ugmo ( 36922 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @01:44PM (#8716848)
    Wild guess. I haven't seen a picture and I'm not from the Salt Lake Area but if "the Bomb" is not an actual Bomb it could be an external fuel tank for a jet fighter. They are made to detach. They are shaped like WWII Bombs.

    I would hope that if it were a real bomb the Air Force would have taken steps to recover and disarm it.

  • Top 10 Mysterious Salt Lake Objects Found (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @05:00PM (#8719190)
    10. My car keys!
    9. Jimmy Hoffa
    8. Lot's wife
    7. Whitewater Rose Law firm files
    6. That 28-hour directors cut of the Lynch "Dune" movie that everyone has been talking about
    5. Mormon Gold Tablets
    4. Those pesky Iraqi WMD's
    3. Vast expanse of land covered with the Trump logo
    2. Xemu's SUV.

    and the #1 object

    1. a lot of dried salt

  • Thiokol rocket testing (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Muhammar ( 659468 ) on Tuesday March 30, 2004 @05:32PM (#8719570)
    Morton Thiokol (of the infamous shuttle SRB's) did a lot of vertical rocket test firing in remote areas right by shores of Salt Lake. I guess it is hard to keep a good rocket down.
  • I guess I can see someone's reasoning. Someone somewhere has probably plotted a graph of water level over time and that data makes this whole topic 'scientific'.

  • Cthulhu? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So, are the people of Salt Lake City experiencing any weird dreams? Bouts of madness? People being eaten by giant squid-headed elder gods?

    No? I could've sworn my latest calculations showing R'lyeh was in Utah were correct!
  • Trying to decide just who owns a piece of real estate on the shore of the Great Salt Lake can be a really interesting problem. Other lakes in Utah also seem to have this problem, but it only really comes up when the lakes get too high or too low.

    In the case of Salt Lake, because it is so shallow a drop of only a few feet can explose hundreds of acres of land. Admittedly it is rather smelly mud, and unless you are walking around in hip boots you would probabally not really want to get out into it except in a few spots. Still, some people have ranches that are on the lake shore and sometimes let their cattle wander out a little farther.

    It is also debateable about wheither people using recreational vehicles can use the land. During times of high water levels you really can't drive around the Great Salt Lake, except on public highways that don't exactly follow the shoreline. When the water gets low however, there are no fences (usually) to get in the way of taking a 4-wheel ORV out into the mud. Also, by state law any land found below the statutory lake level is public property, which is what most people use as the excuse for why they can travel on the land. Of course, this even gets even more bizzare when older land claims, including stuff settled from the Homestead Act get into play that prempt the state law, so it isn't always so clear.

    Hill Air Force Base does routine training over the Great Salt Lake as well, including flights into the Wendover Test Range. The western shore of the Great Salt Lake is pretty much uninhabited, and some of the bomb testing range does extend onto the shore. It is not unheard of for F-16's to go crashing into the lake, although the Air Force does try to recover all of the pieces when it does happen. The Test Range does have quite a bit of unexploded munitions that make it very hazardous to wander around the area without a guide. The area is about the size of a typical mid-western county.

  • Just in case you are wondering (Score:5, Informative)

    by eclectro ( 227083 ) on Wednesday March 31, 2004 @07:55AM (#8724213)
    There are F-16s that have crashed in the lake. The military decided it was too expensive to recover them since they were destroyed anyway. So they let them sink in the mud (presumably they did). I imagine that there is other airplane junk in the lake too, being the flyover for a military base.

    There are some interesting artifacts [deseretnews.com] around the lake. Being a desert region seems to attract a number of artists that sees it as their [sltrib.com] canvas. [roadsideamerica.com] It's where you see all the car commercials with the car zooming along in a vast desert expanse on white ground (the salt flats).

    It's unfortunate, but we do not have an enviromentally conscious citzenry. All sorts of trash and junk. have been dumped out at the lake, just so they wouldn't have to pay a landfill fee or bother with it.

    It's true that the lake does have an ecosystem, but not much of one, as it is very salty.

    Also, the Salt Lake is not the swimmer's aquatic paradise. At one time it was considered to be. There was a large resort [geocities.com] on the shore. Unfortunately it burned to the ground when some vagrants built a campfire on the wooden floor (smart, huh?).

    The lake was so salty that you would indeed float like a cork. But because of a railway causeway across the lake, the south end (where everybody goes swimming) does not have enough salinity as the lake is fed by freshwater sources there.

    The lake does not have any natural beaches, but rather mud flats for shoreline. Not like what you find at the ocean. There are some man made ones, and this is where you can go spend the day if you want.

    But even if you do find a spot of sand to toss the blanket on, there are "brine flies", the other half of the lake's ecosystem. Imagine a hord of gnats that want to make you their business.

    There is bacteria that thrive in this anaeoribic enviroment around the shoreline. The resulting byproduct of their efforts is hydrogen sulfide, or as we like to call it "lake stink". If the wind is just right, there is not a place in the valley that you can go to escape it. But that only happens occasionally, like before a rainstorm. I think the natives like myself have a fondness for it (since it only happens a couple times a year) as it reminds us that we live in a unique place. However, if you are down on the shore, there are days it is very bad.

    After years of drought, the lake is at a low point right now. However in the mid-eighties, it was at the highest point ever. An interesting engineering feat (or more likely boondoggle) was the installation of massive pumps [deseretnews.com] that are capable of pumping the lake in order to lower the level.

    There are a number of mineral companies that remove salt, rare metals (magnesium), and other minerals from the lake.

    However, until recently (last 15-20 years), there was not that much concern for the lake ecology. The thing that people did/do not realize is that like other resources, it is finite.

    There was a time that nobody harvested brine shrimp eggs. Now there are a number of companies that have to be regulated so they do not remove the entire next generation of brine shrimp from the lake. Indications are that decades of removing minerals from the lake have depleted the salt flats. So much so, that the world famous Bonneville Speedway [virtualguidebooks.com] does not have enough rock hard salt to break speed records on anymore.

    My favorite thing about the lake? Without a doubt it is Pink Floyd [emcweb.com], an escapee from a local aviary. He's more predictable than the swallows at Capistrano. Every year he makes

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