Ground water recharge could rival mineral extraction pumping in its impact on GSL inflow losses.
Secondly it could also be causing double counting; water for M&I water diverted after storage to recharge ground water, then counted as diversion again upon pumping for other human consumption.

2/
Another quiet pathway, unaccounted in previous studies, reducing GSL inflow.
Only by accounting for every pathway can we get a true diagnostic, and the only way to reach the right prescription.

4/
Water "donations" are loans, repaid in spring. no real-world effect.
Some agricultural changes that might help but have no published quantification. Some agricultural changes harm the lake by removing return flows.
We’re spending money without hydrologic accounting, and that's not good.

3/
Cloud seeding shows theoretical promise but lacks measured contribution and must make it through anthropogenic impoundments to impact water to the lake.

2/
So far, the list of interventions that actually add water to Great Salt Lake is tiny, and almost entirely unquantified.

The US Magnesium purchase is the only clear, structural gain.

4/
A dry playa with a strong crust is dust‑silent.
A wet playa with a broken crust can still become dust‑active once it dries.
The presence or absence of water is not the mechanism.
Crust integrity is.
End.

3/
Biological films
vegetation grows
Freeze–thaw hardening
Rain‑induced surface sealing
Desiccation crusts that reform after disturbance

These processes can create a surface harder than concrete, even in long dry periods.

2/
Dust only lifts when the surface is erodible.
And the Great Salt Lake playa is constantly generating natural armoring that has nothing to do with standing water:
Salt crusts
Clay crusts
Evaporite cementation

8/
But the conservation paradox is missed and return flow is uncounted.
The result is simple: conservation reduces diversions on paper while reducing inflow to the lake in reality.

7/
And now a third attempt to unintentionally break the lake is underway.
We’re told conservation could fix Great Salt Lake, the same “could” logic that drove the 1980s flood response and decades of upstream storage.

6/
Great Salt Lake doesn’t need what water could do.
It needs what water does.
And for decades, the lake simply hasn’t received the inflow it needs to survive.

5/
This is why the language shift matters.
“Depletion” makes people think the water disappeared.
But the lake is collapsing because of inflow loss, water that stayed upstream long enough to functionally vanish from the lake’s hydrology.

4/
When you strip away the hypotheticals, two mechanisms dominate the lake’s decline:
3–4 feet lost from the GSL pumping project
3–6+ feet lost from multi‑decade non‑return storage

That’s 6–10 feet of real, historical inflow loss.

3/
Today, the same “could” logic hides the real inflow losses.
Water held in reservoirs could help next year.
Upstream storage could benefit the lake eventually.

But for 40 years, it hasn’t.
The lake only responds to delivered water, not imagined futures.

2/
This mindset broke the system in the 1980s.
Leaders feared the lake could keep rising, so they:
built emergency pumps
justified massive infrastructure
later built Jordanelle to guard against flooding that could return

All based on worst‑case hypotheticals.

#GreatSaltLake has about 2,000,000 surface acres exposed to evaporation depletion. Over 178 years, human infrastructure has created another 478,000 acres of evaporation‑exposed water, surfaces that do not exist in an unregulated system.

4/
Evaporation recirculation is another “return‑to‑flow” pathway missing from depletion statistics.
Depletion is when water leaves the basin, not when it leaves our sight.
Those two things are not the same, and GSL inflow accounting needs to reflect that.

3/
Once we separate evaporation from depletion, the picture shifts across every part of GSL’s inflow accounting.
Evaporation is a major part of the basin’s natural water budget but treating it as automatic depletion has overshadowed the mechanisms that actually determine human‑caused losses.