Geology in Pop Culture - Salt Lake City Trax Station

 I love little nods to geology in everyday life and one of the Salt Lake City Trax stations has some geological themed plaques that I had been wanting to get pictures of for years. Well, since I was planning on moving I figured it was now or never and I ended up getting the pictures about a month before I left (in March of 2021). This is actually nearby to another Trax station with other geological themed materials I had taken pictures of previously.  

The Trax Station, which is known as Gallivan Plaza, has a series of "X" shaped plaques embedded within the floor of the station with various facts about Salt Lake City and Utah in general.

There are 8 X's in total (at least the ones I found) and I am including all of them here. Even though some of the X's pictured at the bottom here don't have geologically related content, they do have interesting information. 

...the Great Salt Lake usually measures about 2100 square miles; Lake Michigan is about 24,400 square miles...

...the pronghorn antelope is Utah's fastest mammal and Antelope Island was named for it...

The Great Salt Lake is one of the most notable geological features in the region, being an end basin (meaning the water does not flow out to any ocean and ends up in the lake) and is the largest lake in the United States outside of the Great Lakes (of which only Lake Michigan is completely in the United States). Since it is an endbasin, all of the dissolved minerals like salt build up over time and eventually make the Great Salt Lake the salty landmark it is today.

...salinity in the Great Salt Lake is about 8 times that of the ocean and companies harvest the salt for more than 1,000 uses...

...the first successful artificial heart and kidney were transplanted here...

As mentioned above, the salts in the Great Salt Lake have built up over many 10's of thousands to 100's of thousands of years as the water eroded the surrounding landscape and deposited the salts in the lake like a pan of water set to boil too long. Oceans typically have salinity between 34 and 36 ppt (parts per thousand), meaning that if you take 1,000 grams of oceanic water and evaporate all of the water away, you would be left with 34 to 36 grams of salt. While the Great Salt Lake varies depending on location within the lake, the range of salinity goes from 50 ppt in the Southern Arm to 240 ppt in the Northern Arm. Eight times the value of oceanic salinity at 35 ppt is indeed around the highest levels of salinity in the Great Salt Lake (~280 ppt). 

...about 350 tons of fossil were excavated near Dinosaur National Monument in the early 1900's...

...a mountain once stood where the world's largest open pit mine now sits in nearby Binghan (sp) Canyon...

Although proclaimed a national monument in 1915, the main dinosaur quarry was still actively excavated until 1924. The excavation was led by Earl Douglass, working for the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, and continued until funding eventually ran out after Andrew Carnegie died. Douglass left the quarry in 1924, and since then no bones have been removed. From discover in 1909 until 1924 Douglass ended up removing nearly 350 tons of fossils, mostly dinosaurs, including fossils of Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Barosaurus, Allosaurus, Ceratosaurus, Torvosaurus, Camptosaurus, Dryosaurus, and Stegosaurus. The quarry sits within the Jurassic age Morrison Formation and I go much more into the geology of Dinosaur National Monument HERE. 

Located in the Oquirrh Mountains on the west side of the Salt Lake Valley, the Bingham (Spelled "Binghan" in the plaque) Canyon mine was indeed a former mountain that had been slowly whittled away over time. Per the Utah Geological Survey, the Bingham Canyon Mine:

"...  is one of the largest and most efficient mines in the world. It has produced more copper than any other district in the U.S., accounting for over 16% of total U.S. copper production. In addition to copper, the mine produces gold, molybdenum, and silver. KUC’s combined annual value of these metals peaked in 2011 at $2.9 billion."

Currently the Bingham Copper Mine is the 2nd most active copper producing mine in the US and one of the top gold producers in the US as well. I go much more into the geology of the mine HERE as well. 

...11 national parks are located less than a day's drive from here...

...the usual humidity here is 15% or less...

I assume the 11 national parks here are just the parks designated as "National Parks" including Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, Great Basin, Arches, Bryce, Zion, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, Rocky Mountain, Death Valley, and the Grand Canyon. That doesn't even include the numerous parks run by the National Park Service within and surrounding Utah.  

Although Salt Lake City itself doesn't qualify as a desert, the western part of the state easily does. A desert, by definition, is any place that gets less than 10 inches of precipitation a year. That means that there is typically not much water in the air, and hence a very low amount of humidity. Salt Lake City itself averages 19.5 inches a year of rainfall, and much of that is due to the mountains inducing rain to the east of the city.

..."Wasatch" means "mountains of many waters"... 

...several major and minor fault lines are located along the Wasatch Range...

The Wasatch mountains are the mountain range found along the east side of the Salt Lake Valley. Although the the translation on the plaque says Wasatch mean "mountains of many waters" the most common translation that I can find is that Wasatch is a Ute word meaning "low place in high mountains", of which I can see the correlation between the two. 

And as for the faults:

As this map from the Utah Geological Survey can attest to, the Wasatch Front is indeed riddled faults. The Wasatch Fault itself is not just one continuous line but a series of short faults that all interconnect with each other. That is why it is more accurate to say the "Wasatch Fault Zone" since there are so many smaller fault segments. 

The following plaques have some of the less geologically related facts.

...a recipe for storable pemmican cake: dried grasshoppers and crickets mixed with berries...

...no fish live in the Great Salt Lake but other lake life include tiny brine shrimp and larvae of small brine flies...

Random fact: the brine shrimp of the Great Salt Lake have been more commonly mass marketed as "sea monkeys". 

...the Great Salt Lake Valley has been continuously inhabited for over 10,000 years...

...Utah is named for the Ute Indians and "ute" means "a high place"...

I love the Native American facts that these plaques provide as well. Especially since Utah has such a rich Native history with tribes indeed occupying the lands now known as Utah for many centuries before any of the European descended explorers entered the picture.  

...the first recorded knowledge of the Great Salt Lake was by Silvestre de Escalante in 1776 but he never actually saw the lake...

...the world's largest genealogical library is located here and records date back to the 1500s...

And the final plaque. We actually visited the genealogical library run by the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (you don't need to be a member to use the library), which has a ton of resources for those seeking their family history, not just from Utah but from around the globe.