“Survivors of a Shrinking Lake: Evaluating Temperature Tolerance in Great Salt Lake Haloarchaea to Assess their Ability to Induce Ice Nucleation"

Orem, UT

Great Salt Lake is an ecosystem under threat. Water depletion and climate change have impacted this lake, causing it to shrink and salinity to increase. This project centers on the possibility of salt-thriving halophiles to serve as ice-nucleating particles (INPs) in the atmosphere, which could affect the local weather patterns and attract moisture. Biologically derived materials, such as microorganisms or pollen, can act as INPs, initiating the freezing of water droplets in clouds even at relatively warm temperatures. Great Salt Lake is enriched with many different strains of haloarchaea that could react differently as INPs. The goals of this project are to 1) Isolate strains of haloarchaea from the hypersaline region of Great Salt Lake, [see fig.1] 2) Genetically identify the isolated species, 3) Testing the resistance of haloarchaea strains under increasingly cold temperatures, 4) Collaborating to perform ice spectrometry to test for induce for their ability freezing [see fig. 3]. Understanding the behavior of halophiles under specific environmental conditions is crucial to expanding our understanding of biological impacts on clouds, especially over saline lakes such as Great Salt Lake. What’s more, forming INPs may have positive impacts on the water crisis of the west.