The Life of the Great Salt Lake: Birds, Brine, and Minerals

The Food Web, In Order

Almost everything alive in the Great Salt Lake traces back to the same short chain. Nothing here is exotic — it's algae, brine flies, and brine shrimp — but it supports one of the largest concentrations of migratory birds in the Western Hemisphere.

Simplified — the lake also hosts halophilic (salt-loving) bacteria and archaea in its saltiest water, which don't feed the bird population but are responsible for the pink color sometimes visible in Gunnison Bay.

• Brine shrimp (Artemia franciscana) and brine flies are among the only species that can tolerate the lake's salinity, and together they form the base of the food web that draws birds to the lake.
• Both species have a narrow salinity comfort zone. Gilbert Bay's healthy range is 13–15% salinity; at the 2022 record low, salinity there reached 19% — close to the upper limit brine shrimp and brine flies can tolerate before the food web itself is at risk.
• The lake has no fish. That absence is part of why brine shrimp populations can get so large: there's no fish predation to keep their numbers down.

The Birds

The Great Salt Lake has been a Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network site since 1991 — a designation reserved for sites of major importance to shorebird populations across the Americas.

• The lake and its roughly 21,000-square-mile watershed fall under the Pacific Flyway, one of four major North American migratory bird corridors — birds use it as a stopover and breeding site on routes that can run over a thousand miles.
• Utah, and therefore the Great Salt Lake, falls under the Pacific Flyway per the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service's own administrative flyway map (some other sources describing the lake have mislabeled this as the Central Flyway — treated as an error on those pages, not a real alternate designation).
• Birds don't use the lake uniformly. Different bays and wetland complexes (Farmington Bay, Bear River Bay, Ogden Bay) serve different species and purposes, from nesting to a mid-migration feeding stopover.
• Exposed lakebed doesn't just mean less open water — it also means less shoreline and wetland habitat, and more dust exposure for the birds and habitat that remain, tying bird health directly to the elevation story covered in the companion piece.

The Brine Shrimp Industry

Brine shrimp aren't just fish food for the birds — they're a commercial export. Harvesters collect brine shrimp cysts (dormant eggs) from the lake each fall, and the industry is a genuinely global one.

• Harvest is regulated by the state, with a set season and quota system intended to leave enough of the population to sustain both the industry and the bird populations that depend on the same food source.
• The industry and the birds are, in effect, competing for the same resource — which is part of why the state caps how much can be harvested each season rather than leaving it unregulated.
• Utah also collects a royalty tax on brine shrimp harvesting. A 2026 bill (H.B. 247) increased that royalty rate and directed the added revenue into the state's Sovereign Lands Management Account, which funds lake conservation work.

What's Pulled From the Lake

Beyond brine shrimp, several companies extract minerals directly from the lake's water through solar evaporation ponds — and that extraction uses a meaningful share of the lake's water even as its level struggles to recover.

Compass Minerals

• Compass Minerals is the largest mineral extractor on the lake and the largest producer of sulfate-of-potash fertilizer in the Western Hemisphere, drawing lake water into evaporation ponds on both the north and south sides.
• The company's average water depletion from 2017–2021 was about 111,700 acre-feet a year — the single largest mineral-extraction water use on the lake — though usage reportedly dropped to roughly 55,000 acre-feet in more recent years as lake levels declined. Its water rights allow for up to 428,000 acre-feet annually.
• Compass also returns 3–5 million tons of salt to the lake each year as a byproduct of processing, concentrated in Bear River Bay.
• The company explored expanding into lithium extraction starting in 2022; that effort was later suspended.
• In 2024, the Utah Legislature passed H.B. 453, nearly tripling the state's mineral-extraction severance tax (from 2.6% to 7.8%) and creating incentive frameworks for voluntary water-use reductions — legislation that reporting ties to a subsequent water-use agreement between the state and Compass Minerals.

US Magnesium — From Producer to State Purchase

• US Magnesium operated on the lake's south shore for decades as the country's largest magnesium metal producer, also recovering lithium as a byproduct from its waste piles.
• The plant stopped production in 2021 after equipment failures. The state terminated its mineral lease in 2024 over regulatory violations, and the site had separately been designated a federal Superfund site due to contamination.
• The company filed for bankruptcy in September 2025. In January 2026, the State of Utah purchased its assets for $30 million — including roughly 144,000 acre-feet a year in water rights — explicitly to keep that water from being withdrawn from the lake's south arm rather than to resume magnesium production.

Salt and the Lithium Question

• Morton Salt and Cargill Salt also operate solar evaporation ponds on the lake, producing table and industrial salt.
• Lilac Solutions — a subsidiary of Waterleaf Phase 1 LLC — has filed for water rights (roughly 225,000 acre-feet) tied to a proposed lithium-extraction project. That project is covered in full, including its federal grant and discharge-permit history, in this docket's own case file (linked below).
• Collectively, mineral extractors account for roughly 7% of all water depletions from the Great Salt Lake, according to state legislative reporting — a smaller share than agricultural or municipal use, but concentrated among a handful of named companies rather than spread across the whole basin.

Underground: What Miners Once Took From the Shoreline

Away from the lake's open water, the hills around it — particularly the Promontory Peninsula in Box Elder County — have their own, older mineral history.

• The historic Promontory Mining District produced zinc, lead, and silver starting in the early 1900s; Utah's own geological survey credits it with more than 90% of Box Elder County's total zinc production since 1915.
• Nearby Crater Island is documented as a site for barite, diatomite, bismuth, copper, gold, molybdenum, silver, and tungsten deposits, per the same state survey.
• Oil seeps at Rozel Point — the same stretch of shoreline as the Spiral Jetty earthwork — drew drilling interest starting in 1904, and at least nine wells produced oil there from Tertiary-era basalt.
• None of this is necessarily a live gold rush today: current federal mining-claim records show no active claims at the historic Promontory sites specifically, and at least one of the district's major historic mines has been formally assessed as depleted with no further exploration planned. The documented history is real; whether commercially significant reserves remain there today is a separate, open question.

Questions Worth Asking

As with the companion piece, these are drawn from public statements and public records — not to catch anyone out, but because the answers aren't fully public yet.

"The Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust is helping bring more water to Great Salt Lake and its wetlands, which are crucial for millions of birds that rely on this ecosystem and the health of the surrounding communities." — Tim Brown, President/CEO of Tracy Aviary, Great Salt Lake Watershed Enhancement Trust Council member

Mineral extractors use about 7% of the lake's water and the state just spent $30 million buying out one of them for its water rights alone — how does that kind of direct water acquisition compare, dollar for dollar, to the Trust's own water-transaction pace covered in this docket's funding case files?

"Restoring Great Salt Lake to health will not be a one-year, one-policy, one-constituency solution. Rather, a coordinated, data-driven approach will be necessary so decision-makers can evaluate tradeoffs and balance competing interests." — Brian Steed, then–Great Salt Lake Commissioner, via the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. Hannah Freeze was appointed Commissioner in his place on July 22, 2026.

If mineral extraction, brine shrimp harvest, and bird habitat are all drawing on the same water and the same food web, what does "balancing competing interests" look like in practice when one of those interests just became a $30 million state asset?