The natural-color image at the top of the page (right) was captured by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 on October 18, 2022. To fill the gap in recent years, some researchers have relied on Landsat observations of the lake’s areal extent to provide estimates of the remaining water volume. Researchers use a gauge on the eastern shore of the lake to track water levels and calculate the level and volume of the lake, but water levels fell below the lowest level of the gauge in 2019. “There has been little or no inflow from the Chewaucan River, at the south end of the lake for the past two years.” Fish and Wildlife Service and one of the study’s coauthors. “We haven’t seen Lake Abert so low since the Dust Bowl,” added Ron Larson, a retired biologist with the U.S.

“What we’re seeing in Lake Abert is worrying, and it is consistent with what you'd expect from this region because of climate warming.” “Lake Abert is largely fed by snowmelt emanating from the mountains to the west of the lake,” Hall said. The research was recently published in Earth and Space Science. They found that between 20, fewer days of snow cover and higher surface temperatures led to greater evaporation over Lake Abert. The lake mostly dried up in 2014, 2015, 2021, and 2022 due to water withdrawals and dry weather, which caused the salinity of the lake’s remaining water to spike-becoming, at times, too high even for brine shrimp and flies.In order to improve understanding of why Abert is drying up, a team of researchers led by University of Maryland and NASA research scientist Dorothy Hall analyzed two decades of environmental data collected by the Terra satellite. But the past few decades have been anything but normal for Lake Abert. Instead, it supports large quantities of alkali flies and tiny crustaceans called brine shrimp (below), which have long provided a feast for several species of migrating birds. Under normal circumstances, the lake’s water is too salty for fish.

But the food source has become threatened in recent years. The shallow, salty lake in southern Oregon has long functioned like an all-you-can-eat buffet for many of these winged travelers. Every year, tens of thousands of birds flock to Lake Abert as they journey from parts of the Great Basin toward the Pacific flyway, a migration route that extends from Alaska and Canada, through California, to Mexico and South America.

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