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Iran’s government hopes to save Lake Urmia for both wildlife and recreation, including therapeutic baths in its very salty waters.
HOSSEIN FATEMI/PANOS PICTURES/REDUX
After revival, Iran’s great salt lake faces new peril
Apr. 29, 2021 , 3:10 PM
Twenty years ago, geochemist Arash Sharifi began to drill sediment cores in Iran’s Lake Urmia—then the largest lake in the Middle East—to probe its recent climate history. “I was shocked at how little was known about the lake,” recalls Sharifi, now at Beta Analytic Inc. in Miami. He became entranced by the “very unique chemistry” of its hypersaline waters. He also grew alarmed: Dams on feeder rivers and a proliferation of illegal wells had made the lake, a favorite haunt of flamingos and migratory birds, “vulnerable to hydrological collapse,” he wrote in an internal government report.