A Glowing Sphere Towering Over Utah Sent an Urgent Artistic Message: The Great Salt Lake Is Drying Up

Olafur Eliasson’s latest installation married visuals with a soundscape to draw the public’s attention to the plight of the important ecosystem

Sonja Anderson | Daily Correspondent

April 16, 2026

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A massive, glowing sphere recently appeared in a park in Salt Lake City, complemented by a layered chorus of flies, birds and bison. The immersive public artwork had a somber ecological mission: to publicize the decline of Utah’s Great Salt Lake, which is rapidly drying up.

A Symphony of Disappearing Sounds for the Great Salt Lake, by the Icelandic Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, was the final artwork in a series of installations for Wake the Great Salt Lake, a multiyear public art project addressing climate change and human water overuse.

“The Great Salt Lake is not only an environmental landmark but a defining part of Utah’s identity and cultural landscape,” Felicia Baca, executive director of the Salt Lake City Arts Council, tells Amplify Utah’s Caitlyn Homolya. “Public art has a unique ability to translate complex issues into experiences people can feel and remember.”

The artwork was installed in Memory Grove park, 20 miles from the lake, between March 26 and April 4. Its visual element was an elevated 40-foot sphere, lit by surrounding projectors. Visitors came to see the sphere “glowing like a beacon after dark,” reports the Art Newspaper’s Angella d’Avignon. At 9 p.m. each night, she writes, “the sequence began with a flickering field of light, like a constellation or swarm, before resolving into shifting light streaks of wind currents rippling across the surface.” The visuals were inspired by nature, Eliasson writes in an artistic statement.

The main attraction of the installation was its soundscape. The show included a 30-minute audio piece, which Eliasson created with Welsh music producer Koreless. Per Eliasson’s artistic statement, the “orchestral parliament” contained 150 field recordings of natural phenomena, as well as animals that depend on the Great Salt Lake: the buzz of brine flies, which rely on food sources now threatened by the lake’s rising salinity. The bellows of grazing bison that depend on the lake for drinking water. The calls of birds that stop at the lake during their yearly migrations.

“Great Salt Lake is a dynamic living system,” Eliasson wrote. “Its rhythms shape the region, and its future is inseparable from our own. When we engage with Great Salt Lake—look at it and listen to it—can we experience, or even feel, the immense scale of what is disappearing?”

In 2022, the Great Salt Lake reached its lowest level ever recorded, triggering lawmakers to devote public funds to its conservation. Some 800 square miles of lakebed are still dry, “baking in the desert heat, sometimes billowing toxic dust plumes across the state’s urban core,” wrote the New York Times’ Leia Larsen in 2025.

The lake’s decline has been attributed to both warmer winters and increasing water use. Per a March statement from the Salt Lake City mayor’s office, measurements taken in February showed that Utah’s snowpack levels were some of the lowest recorded since the 1980s, meaning less water to fill the lake. Farming operations and cities are also diverting water.

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Ecologists warn that if conditions don’t change, the Great Salt Lake could disappear in a few years. Its absence would constitute an “environmental nuclear bomb,” State Representative Joel Ferry said in 2022, per the New York Times’ Christopher Flavelle.

“The call to save the Great Salt Lake has never been more urgent, and this artwork makes clear that the health of our residents and our ecosystems rise and fall together,” Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said in a March statement. “This installation reminds us that the lake’s future is tied to our own. When the lake suffers, so does our air quality, economy, recreation and wildlife.”

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Sonja Anderson | Read More

Sonja Anderson is a daily correspondent for Smithsonian magazine who covers art, archaeology and culture, from newly discovered artifacts to the latest art heists.