Lake Bonneville

The results of equation (E6.2.3), given in Table E6.2.1, indicate that, under the current conditions, it would have taken roughly 85,000 years to reach the current salinity of the Great Salt Lake. This, of course, ignores the fact that the Great Salt Lake has shrunk considerably over the years from Lake Bonneville, leaving the Bonneville Salt Flats, and that past flows into the lake were not at the current value. The actual age of the lake is 18,000 to 25,000 years so, our assumptions were relatively accurate (i.e., the correct order of magnitude). 

Great Salt Lake. During the past 25,000 years, Great Salt Lake has varied from the deep (300 meters), freshwater Lake Bonneville to a very shallow (<8 meters), highly saline lake. The first-order expectation for sulfur concentrations in a lake alternating between fresh water (low sulfate) and saline water (high sulfate) are ... 

A similar case is that of the Great Salt Lake, whose origin is Lake Bonneville (a remnant of a huge freshwater lake that lost its outlet to the sea), which receives inputs from several rivers and streams but with no outflow other than evaporation. It receives 2 million tons of dissolved salts each year, leached from soils and rocks, and its salinity fluctuates from 5% (similar to seawater) to 27% (near saturation) depending on the water inflow and rain input. 

Broecker, W.S. Orr, P.C. (1958). Radiocarbon chronology of Lake Lahontan and Lake Bonneville. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 69, 1009-1032. 

At its largest. Lake Bonneville covered about 32,000 km. What percentage of that area does the Great Salt Lake now cover ... 

United States BonneidSle Sait Flats, Wendover, Utah - The potash operation near Wendover, Utah, processes subsurface brines that are remnants of the waters of ancient Lake Bonneville, just as the brines are in the Great Salt Lake, 200 km to the east. These brines are associated with the salt crust and shallow sediments of the Bonneville Salt Flats, which cover an area of approximately 400 km. The brine is gathered from extensive trenches in the surface of the flats and directed to solar evaporation ponds. The brine contains considerably less sulfate than does the brine in the Great Salt Lake, and upon solar evaporation most of the potassium salts crystallize as sylvite with halite. The sylvinite is harvested, and KQ is recovered by flotation. 

The Wasatch and Teton faults in the Basin-and-Range province in western USA show an increase in slip rate in the late Pleistocene and in the Holocene (see review in Hampel et al. 2010). This has been interpreted as a response to unloading due to the disappearance of Lake Bonneville and the Yellowstone ice cap, respectively, at the end of the latest glacial period (Hampel et al. 2010). 

There are other potential high-hthium brine sources that were initially medium-lithium brines extensively evaporated to recover other minerals (such as at the Great Salt Lake, Bonneville Salt Hats, the Dead Sea and the Qinghai playa noted above). The Sua Pan in Botswana (Fig. 1.24), for example contains brine with about 20 ppm Li (Table 1.9), and it is evaporated in solar ponds to produce soda ash. The end-liquors should contain from 200 to 400 ppm Li, and could be further concentrated as... 

Kaufman A, Broecker WS (1965) Comparison of °Th and " C ages for carbonate materials from Lakes Lahontan and Bonneville. J Geophys Res 70 4039-4054 Kaufman A, Ku T-L, Luo S (1995) Uranium-series dating of camotites Concordance between Th-230 and Pa-231 ages. Chem Geol 120 175-181... 

Figure 13 TEQUIL model (Moller et aL, 1997) plots illustrating quantities of salts precipitated (in moles) as a function of fixed increment of solution evaporated for four bodies of brine in the Bonneville desert (initial solution chemistry and model output after Kohler, 2002). Note that relative abundances reflect the concentration of the starting fluid, which is appreciably greater for the West Pond and Shallow Brine Aquifer solutions than for the Great Salt Lake or Reynolds North crustal pore fluids. Of most significance is the ratio of sulfate and chloride salts. In this regard, note the similarities between the Great Salt Lake and West Pond brines. In contrast, the greater association of sulfate with calcium in the Reynolds...

QThe Bonneville Salt Flats In Utah formed when a vast landlocked salt lake evaporated, o People started to use salt as a preservative In the days when the only food to which people had access in winter was the food they had dried, cured, or canned. 

Hart, W.S., Quade, J., Madsen, D.B., Kaufman, D.S. Oviatt, C.G. (2004) The 87Sr/86Sr ratios of lacustrine carbonates and lake level history of the Bonneville paleolake system. Geological Society of America, Bulletin 116, 1107-1119. 

Searles Lake" Great Salt Lake Dead Sea Sua Pan Bonneville ... 

Gale (1945). Garrett (1996) (Searles Lake, Upper and Lower Structure brine Sau Pan, Botswana Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, brine and solar pond end liquor). ... 

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