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Show Attention Salt Lake Boaters ral condition of the tower, and either upright it and activate its warning light system or cut it up and haul it out. UNTIL THAT time, all boaters boa-ters are urged to consider the warning buoy in the area as a hazard zone rather than using it as a marker to sail around as some have been observed doing recently. THE AMOCO tower (west of the northern tip of Antelope Island) was repaired in February Febru-ary in a joint effort by Amoco, and two divisions of the Utah Department of Natural Resources Re-sources and Energy the Utah Geological and Mineral Survey Sur-vey and the Utah Division of Parks and Recreation. The submerged state of Utah tower (which is estimated esti-mated to be in 24 feet of water and about 5-6 feet below the surface) was reportedly bumped by sailboaters once in March and twice in April. Efforts by sailboaters, state park rangers, and research personnel from the Utah Geological and Mineral Survey Sur-vey have been unable to locate the tower using grappling hooks and draglines. Search efforts are continuing. THE U.S. COAST Guard Auxiliary. Salt Lake County Search and Rescue, and Ken-necott Ken-necott Copper have been contacted con-tacted to explore cooperative search programs. During the winter months, the lake becomes opaque due to suspended sodium sulphate that forms in the lake on cold winter nights. Algae continues to grow in the lake all winter long and throughout the spring. THE BRINE shrimp which feed on the algae, lay their winter win-ter eggs then die in the fall of the year. When the eggs hatch in the spring, it takes until the end of May before the shrimp have eaten enough algae so you can see to depths of ten feet. By late summer, this interesting in-teresting life cycle has cleared the lake so you can see to depths of 20 feet or more. A researcher from the Utah Geological and Mineral Survey Sur-vey and a pilot from the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources flew over the area May 1; but the water was still too opaque for the submerged tower to be spotted. As soon as the tower is located, the state will make the location with additional buoys, determine the structu- A toppled weather research tower has created a hazard for sailboaters on the Great Salt Lake. The hazard lies in relatively rela-tively shallow water in the pro-ximity pro-ximity of the Great Salt Lake Saltair Marina. STAN ELMER, planning coordinator for the Utah State Department of Natural Resources, Re-sources, explaind how the situation occurred and what state agencies are doing about it. Ice on the Great Salt Lake? How can that be? The lake is so salty that it doesn't freeze! DO YOU remember the long fog spell last winter? During that time the thin layer of much fresher water on top of the heavier brines of the main body of the lake (south arm) froze into sheets of one-inch thick ice covering many square miles of the lake. Winter winds moving the ice around generated enough force to shear a leg off one of the research towers placed in the lake by Amoco as part of its oil exploration program. The ice bent other legs on the Amoco Amo-co tower and completely tipped tip-ped over a second state of Utah tower that sits two miles west northwest of the Saltair Marina. |
