Can this startup save the Great Salt Lake?

The Great Salt Lake is disappearing. Since 1850, it has lost more than half its surface area and nearly two-thirds of its volume. Right now, 800 square miles of dry lakebed sit exposed, and the heavy metals in that cracked surface are blowing toward Salt Lake City, one of the country’s fastest-growing metro areas.

This is a water scarcity issue, but it’s also a public health problem, an impending ecological catastrophe, and, if nothing changes, the Salt Lake area may become unlivable.

So, what do you do when the water a state has relied on for generations is at risk of drying up?

In this episode of Disasterproof, I went to Salt Lake City to meet a founder with an answer that sounds almost too simple: make it rain. Or more precisely, make it snow. Rainmaker founder and CEO Augustus Doricko believes his company’s cloud seeding technology can do something extraordinary: stop the desiccation of the Great Salt Lake and the depletion of the Colorado River.

Before studying up on Rainmaker, I thought of cloud seeding as a fringe new technology. Look it up online, and you’ll see that it’s surrounded by misinformation and even a few conspiracy theories. So it surprised me to learn that the US has been doing it for over 70 years, and it’s been studied closely for as long.

Historically, the biggest challenge was never whether we could seed clouds; it was that we couldn’t measure the results. It was hard to tell how much rain was being produced by the process. Rainmaker is changing that. Their drones fly into clouds that commercial airliners actively avoid, and their radar can validate every flight. Rainmaker, alongside the Utah Department of Natural Resources, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the University of Utah, and Utah State University, says it can finally prove that cloud seeding works and that it can produce millions of gallons of precipitation in a single operation.

The stakes are high. This year’s snowpack was Utah’s worst in 50 years. And on the other side of the planet, the Aral Sea shows how this story ends if nothing changes: over 90% of it is gone. The fishing economy collapsed, and the dried-up seabed created toxic dust that caused severe health problems for the region.

After meeting Augustus, Scott Hotaling, and Jon Jennings for this episode, I was struck by the scale of what Utah is up against. I also came away impressed by Rainmaker’s ambition and the state’s willingness to bet on a young startup.

If cloud seeding proves as effective as recent validation studies suggest, it would be one of the few approaches to water scarcity that actually adds new water to the system. That makes it an incredibly compelling technology to watch.

Watch the full episode on YouTube.