A combination of changes in the environment and human activities like mining and high-speed racing have caused the Bonneville Salt Flats to shrink. George Newsīut much as it has for millennia, the landscape is evolving. 19, 2022, near Wendover, Utah | Associated Press photo by Rick Bowmer, St. Visitors watch sunrise at the Bonneville Salt Flats on Monday, Sept. Their turns and skids leave tire tracks at the edge of the world-renowned Speedway. Racers flock here and drive rocket-ship-looking vehicles up to 600 miles per hour (966 kilometers per hour). The salt is ideal terrain for racecar driving - it’s flat enough to accelerate and moist enough to prevent tires from overheating at high speeds. The crystals can look like snow, a moonscape or even another planet. The landscape is flat, but for 1-inch-raised hexagons of salt crystals formed by cycles of flooding and evaporation. But elsewhere, it’s dried out, including at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Water remains in some parts of the lake’s footprint, including Utah’s Great Salt Lake. The area is what’s leftover from Lake Bonneville, a prehistoric body of water that filled after an Ice Age thousands of years ago. In the American West - a region with no shortage of other-worldly landscapes - this crystalline expanse near the Utah-Nevada line is an awe-striking natural wonder. The water’s color appears turquoise because it’s been dyed by a mining company that channels brine to ponds where it evaporates and leaves behind valuable minerals.

Truck drivers, selfie-stick-wielding tourists and gamblers driving to the casinos of West Wendover, Nevada, are known to stop here to photograph the stark white landscape, along with canals of flowing water. 9, 2022, near Wendover, Utah | Associated Press photo by Rick Bowmer, St. A visitor to Bonneville Salt Flats poses for a photograph pm Sunday, Oct. SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The Bonneville Salt Flats sit just off of a highway in a state nowhere near the ocean, but in parts they glimmer as white as a Caribbean beach.

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