Behrens Trench Origin, Utah

This canal, called the Behrens Trench, was built in 1991 by the Great Salt Lake Minerals and Chemicals Company, which operated the salt and potash plant on the lake at that time. Moving liquid brine inside a liquid lake, it is unique in the nation, if not the world. The canal continues across the lake, underwater, cut into the lake bottom, and continuously sloping downwards, as it heads eastward. Because brine released from the solar evaporation ponds at its origin is denser and heaver with salts, it stays inside the canal, flowing slowly — water within water. It takes a week or so to ooze its way to the other side (a distance of 21 miles), where the brine is pumped out of the east end of the trench and over the railroad tracks of the causeway, into a more normal canal heading east along the shore of Promontory Point, towards more ponds and a processing plant northwest of Ogden.