If this rate of shrinking continues, the Salt Flats as we know them may not exist for future generations. At least a third of the loss came from mineral extraction - mainly potash mining.
Originally 96,000 acres in size, the Salt Flats have now withered to about 30,000 acres. These salts are suspended in a brine aquifer that rises during wet winter months and subsequently evaporates in warming temperatures, leaving a fresh layer of snow-white crystals every spring and summer. The Salt Flats began forming thousands of years ago when Lake Bonneville dried up, leaving behind the Great Salt Lake and a vast expanse of seasonal marshes filled with salts and minerals such as potassium chloride (potash), gypsum and sodium chloride (table salt). Mineral extraction from Utah’s Salt Flats In 1970, Gary Gabelich - a handsome Californian who had worked as an Apollo test astronaut - drove the Blue Flame, a rocket-powered car that looked like an outsized missile, setting a world land speed record of 622 mph. The 300, 400, 500 and eventually 600 mph records were all set and broken there. The racing history of the Bonneville Salt Flatsīy the time Noeth arrived at the Salt Flats, generations of drivers had made memories and history on the seemingly endless veneer of white salt, earning the flats the nickname “Speed Capital of the World.” Utah native Ab Jenkins had set records in the 1930s in a car christened the “Mormon Meteor III,” which had a bizarrely long snout designed to fit an aircraft engine and a tiny cockpit (he also set a 68 mph record on the flats driving a tractor and once drove the same 10-mile track for 24 hours, emerging from the car clean-shaven, having used a razor while driving the last loop at 125 mph without a windshield).īy 1949, the Salt Flats had become the premier place for racers to see if their vehicles were truly the fastest in the world.
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