Bathymetric Maps for Great Salt Lake, Utah

The Great Salt Lake is the fourth largest terminal lake in the world and the largest U.S. lake west of the Mississippi River. It provides habitat for millions of native birds, brine shrimp, shorebirds, and waterfowl. Until recently, no one knew the actual underwater characteristics of the Great Salt Lake, including its range of depths.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), in cooperation with the Utah Department of Natural Resources, Division of Wildlife Resources, collected bathymetric data for the south part of the Great Salt Lake during 2002–04 using a single beam, high-definition fathometer and real-time differential global positioning system. Approximately 7.6 million depth readings were collected along more than 1,050 miles of survey transects for construction of this map.

Sound velocities were obtained in conjunction with the bathymetric data to provide time-of-travel corrections to the depth calculations. Because of the shallow nature of the lake and the limitations of the instrumentation, contours above an altitude of 4,193 feet were digitized from existing USGS 1:24,000 source-scale digital line graph data. The USGS repeated the process for the north part of the Great Salt Lake during the spring and early summer of 2006.

Courtesy of U.S. Geological Survey.