The Source

The Great Salt Lake is shrinking and we only have ourselves to blame. That’s the message of a new white paper released by Utah State University last week. The water level of the Great Salt Lake is constantly fluctuating, both seasonally and from year to year as we cycle through periods of wet and dry, but that’s all just background noise to a distinct drying up trend over the past 150 years.

The namesake to Utah’s capital city, the Great Salt Lake is really a sort of “closed sea.” But for the past few years the Great Salt Lake has really existed as two separate bodies of water, the north arm, and the south arm. They’re divided by the rock filled railroad causeway that I’m driving down, watching the sun begin to fade into the west desert.

In this final episode of The Source, a look back at 2015 -- the Year of Water. There was a lot of water news to follow from the drought to deadly flash floods in Hilldale to the toxic sludge that flowed into the state from the Gold King Mine in Colorado. There was a massive state water audit and big talks about big projects with big budgets causing big changes to how we’ll get our water in Utah. But in the background of the daily news, there were ongoing stories -- some that stretch back

The Colorado River flows for over 1400 miles through four U.S. states, though it drains seven. It’s sometimes called the American Nile because nearly every drop of it is used by the civilization of the American West. Over 90% of the river is diverted and consumed by nearly 40 million people -- not all of whom live in its watershed. It’s a lifeline in a desert -- something to fight over. But when it gets squeezed through the tight canyons it has carved for itself it creates dramatic places for

A couple years ago I was home for Thanksgiving. Among the litany of things my family said they were thankful for were electricity and clean water. That’s because this particular wing of my family is employed by various utility companies. Then we started talking about who had Friday off and it turned out everyone did except the guy who worked at the wastewater treatment plant. “It’s a big day at the plant,” he said, which took everyone a little while to process. That’s when we started to call the

A lot of people don’t know what happens to water after it gets flushed down the toilet. In Logan, it ends up in a man-made pond, where UPR’s Jennifer Pemberton went on a bird-watching field trip for this month’s episode of The Source .

They’re smuggled in dark containers and shipped across oceans. They’re transported in pods, carried on the backs of furry animals. They’re microscopic and they travel on the wind. They’re beautiful and they’re brought in intentionally. They’re dangerous and they reproduce rapidly. They’re also delicious. Today on The Source, we’re talking about invasive species -- familiar plants and animals that are not native to Utah. We’ll learn which invasive fish the state wants you to eat, how to prevent

UPR’s Jennifer Pemberton has been focused on invasive species for this month’s episode of The Source . Today, she brings us this story about the creative minds behind this summer’s most memorable public service announcement.

A lot of people who move to Logan, Utah, from out of state have this moment when they think a water main must have ruptured because there’s a lot of water gushing down the street. Nope. That’s just ditch water and many people have to figure out how to get water from the that ditch to their lawn or vegetable garden and there are no instructions for this. This episode of The Source is all about irrigation -- the kind that farmers do and the kind that residents of Logan have to do with a system

Last week, students and faculty from Utah State University’s College of Natural Resources led field lessons with elementary school students from around Cache Valley during something they call “NR Days.” USU’s Water Quality Extension programs coordinator Brian Greene taught elementary school students about insects that live in streams for the first part of their lives and in the air as adults. They are called aquatic macroinvertebrates, and Greene said they are biological indicators of clean,