Salt of the Earth (on salt domes and beds)

I am developing an interest in this. Can I ask, that if you are going to do calculations, that you do one at mean salinity levels of todays ocean and the other of the super-saturation levels, so that there is a range to show? I think that would be a more valuable tool, and it would eliminate the nitpicking crap arguments against it when presented. Good stuff so far though.-x

I'm afraid that such calculations are outside my knowledge or ability, but I hope some of our geologists will be able to step up.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Sea water is about 3.4% by weight total salt, with sodium chloride making up a big majority of all the salts. A sodium chloride solution of 26% is saturated, meaning that's all the salt it can hold. So if you take eight liters of seawater and evaporate it down to one liter, sodium chloride will be starting to fall out of solution. (Other salts, like gypsum = calcium sulfate, will start dropping out before the table salt does. Magnesium chloride, for one example, will still be in solution at this point.)Sodium chloride has a density of 2.17 g/cc and seawater about 1.03. This lets us calculate that for each centimeter of salt deposited, you must evaporate about 62 centimeters equivalent of ocean. That would be tough if you were in open ocean or in a worldwide flood.

Thank you.I found some more pictures from the Detroit area where you can get an idea of the size of the layers at this site since they include people in the pictures. There appear to be hundreds of layers, maybe more, and that they vary between just a few inches and a foot or more thick.So it looks like we are going through many repeating cycles of flooding and then evaporation. Is that reasonable?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Seems entirely so to me, just based on seeing Cedar Lake. In wet years it's a lake, and in subsequent dry years it's solid and white, and with a thicker bottom than before.Heck, Jar, you have a few similar pans down in Kenedy County, if I'm not hallucinating again.

Okay, so far check and see if have this right.We have an inland sea that covers about 170,000 square miles, then waiting while all the water evaporates only to have it repeat many, many hundreds of times?So one more question.It seems that the Detroit Salt Mine is now buried under over a thousand feet stuff. That seems like a lot of material.What can you good folk tell me about how that happened?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

I can tell you one way it couldn't have happened, and it starts with an F. But I don't want to spoil things....

Is this it?The little gridded dots appear to be pretty classic oil or gas (likely gas) wells. Is that what they are?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

It appears the Dead Sea is 31.5% and Lake Asal (Djibouti) is 34.8%. Its pretty obvious that those are not NaCl, so it would explain the higher than 26%. But maybe that's helpful information for jars quest. The dead sea page even references salt domes.-xEdited by EighteenDelta, : spelling

That's it. Those are oil wells - you can see the shadows (?) of pump jacks on some of the locations if you zoom in all the way on that photo. I'm betting that the splotchy shapes in the middle of all the white might be some water that hadn't evaporated at the time of the picture. I've never driven out onto the salt myself - just to the northeast edge. I'll have to revisit now that I know that there are lease roads out into the "lake" - they'll be maintained well enough that I won't fall through some sort of crust and be pickled for all time. Hey Anglagard - road trip??

Speaking of Road Trip, I need to get up that way one day soon.Okay, if that is the location, then it seems that it was a pretty regular source of water right up to around the turn of the century. Some info here.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

Sounds good to me, free on Friday and weekend after Thanksgiving. Not free this Saturday or Dec 1, but am on Sundays. Use my work email address for contact as am pretty sure profile one quit working. Will contact at your profile address Friday (in San Angelo all day tomorrow).Wouldn't mind going relatively soon before it starts raining again just in case it might be dry enough to hold decent halite or gypsum crystals (probably wishful thinking but one can always hope).

Back to Motor City.Not only is the salt buried under over a thousand feet of overburden, it appears that there are actually several beds, each separated by layers of rock. Look herefrom this site.It would seem from those images that what happened is that at times the inland sea disappeared completely so that earth built up over the salt, only at a later date for the process to repeat, not just once but several times.Is that a reasonable explanation?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

One would need to know what sort of rocks are there - it might well be that an increased input of sediment into the salt seas/pans was responsible. It doesn't seem it could have gotten a bunch wetter, though - the salt already there would have dissolved with any significant movement of fresh water across it.

Well the layers seem to be hundreds of feet thick.What would that mean?

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion