Then it grew some more. At Red Rock Pass, in Idaho, it spilled over the brim of the Great Basin and into the Snake River Plain. By now it was as large as Lake Michigan. It was not a glacial lake, just a sort of side effect of the distant glaciation, and it sat there for thousands of years with limestone terraces forming and waves cutting benches at the shoreline. Eventually, it began to drop, in stages, pausing
Book I: Basin and Range
wherever evaporation and precipitation were in temporary equilibrium, and more benches were cut and more terraces were made, and then as the rain shadow took over again, the \\jater shrank back past Erie size and kept on shrinking and turning more and more chemical and getting smaller and zakelijke energie vergelijken shallower and shallower and smaller and near the end of its days became the Great Salt Lake. The Great Salt Lake reached out to our right and disappeared in snow. In a sense, there was no beach. The basin flatness just ran to the lake and kept on going, wet. The angle formed at the shoreline appeared to be about i79.9 degrees. There were dark shapes of islands, firmaments in the swirling snow-elongate, north-southtrending islands, the engulfed summits of buried ranges. “Chemically, this is one of the toughest environments in the world,” Deffeyes said. “You swing from the saltiest to the most dilute waters on the planet in a matter of hours. Some of the most! primitive things living are all that can take that. The brine is nearly saturated with sodium chloride. For a short period each year, so much water comes down out of the Wa satch that large parts of the lake surface are relatively fresh. Any creature living there gets an osmotic shock that zakelijke energie amounts to hundreds of pounds per square inch. No higher plants can take that, no higher animals-no multicelled organisms. Few bacteria. Few algae. Brine shrimp, which do live there, die by the millions from the shock.”