A team of scientists takes on the big threats posed by tiny particles out West.
sit atop dried muck at an abandoned marina, glaring reminders that the largest saltwater lake in the Western Hemisphere is disappearing. Three main tributaries empty into Utah’s Great Salt Lake, but decades of their flows being diverted for agriculture, cities, and industry—along with prolonged drought—have starved the 1,700-square-mile body of its lifeblood.
Perry is part of a team of six scientists aiming to track dust, both the extent to which it moves in acute storms and the incognito chronic creep of microscopic granules called particulates that can make one year dustier than the next—or alter the airborne earth’s long-term contribution to climate change.
Jeff Munroe, a geologist at Middlebury College in Vermont and principal investigator of the project, pours black marbles into a simple, shallow plexiglass square with five separate troughs. Dust will get trapped below the spheres, while their dark surfaces will heat up and help evaporate any snow or rain that falls into the troughs.
Carling, meanwhile, studies whether the metals carried along degrade water quality when snow flushes into mountain streams. “During snowmelt we see this increase in metal concentrations in the river,” he says. Using samples from the headwaters of the Provo River, near the weather station, Carling has detected lead, copper, beryllium, and aluminum—none of which could have come from local rock’s parent material, a simple quartzite. “Lead shouldn’t be in these samples,” he says.
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