Salt of the Earth (on salt domes and beds)

And God said: "Let there be salt".Do try to keep up.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

Well, he had to say slightly more than that it seems. He had to say let there be salt and then let there be dirt and then let there be more salt and let there be more rock and then let there be more salt ....

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

God is awesome.

Since he is eternal he is probably a bit senile.He probably went let there be salt dirt and rock, and 5 minutes later o damm i almost forgot let there be salt rock and dirt, 10 minutes later hmm what if i make some salt, dirt and rock on this planet let there ....

Edited by Panda, : potysEdited by Adminnemooseus, : Off-topic banner and message.Edited by Panda, : Hidden as off-topic.

Reference? I have no problem with there being none-salt detrital sediment horizons, but I'm dubious about the soil horizons.Moose

And if you will explain what a none-salt detrial sediment is other than being soil maybe we will all learn something?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Soil is sediment which has undergone pedogenesis, thus turning it into soil. It's not just a synonym for "dirt".

Okay, so change it to dirt instead of soil.Expanding on that.What we see in salt beds are layers of salt separated by layers of dirt.To get the salt we needed to have a relatively quiet body of water then over time evaporated leaving just the salt. To get the layer of dirt we need the layer of salt exposed for a period of time so that additional material is transported in.This process, laying down a layer of salt then a layer of other material got repeated again and again.Is that correct? Edited by jar, : ask questionsEdited by jar, : add imageEdited by jar, : fix subtitle

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

Dead Sea - Wikipedia

quote:

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Around three million years ago, what is now the valley of the Jordan River, Dead Sea, and Wadi Arabah was repeatedly inundated by waters from the Mediterranean Sea. The waters formed in a narrow, crooked bay which was connected to the sea through what is now the Jezreel Valley. The floods of the valley came and went depending on long scale climate change. The lake that occupied the Dead Sea Rift, named "Lake Sodom", deposited beds of salt that eventually became 3 km (1.9 mi) thick.

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Approximately two million years ago, the land between the Rift Valley and the Mediterranean Sea rose to such an extent that the ocean could no longer flood the area. Thus, the long bay became a lake.

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At one time what is now the Dead Sea was connected to the oceans via the Mediterranean Sea. Now any sea basin where the evaporation is greater than the fresh water recharge and that is refilled from the ocean without also flow back out to the ocean is going to get progressively more saline. When salinity levels reach saturation, salt precipitation will start. Having the basin go dry is not at all required. And it would be expected that at least some detrital sediment (sand, silt, and clay (or to Jar, "dirt")) would occasionally be washed into the basin to settle into horizons within the salt beds.During at least parts of the early to middle Paleozoic (and later?), much of the lower peninsula of Michigan was a basin (referred to as the Michigan Basin), and the seas were transgressed onto the continent to including that area. Paleomagnetic study indicates that Michigan was then at a tropical latitude.*I presume that at least at times that Michigan Basin had a restricted connection to the rest of the sea. Thus a situation not unlike the above cited history of the Dead Sea.Moose*Most recently, I got this info from the book Geology of the Lake Superior Region (1, 2), by Gene LaBerge.Added by edit #2: I thought I read somewhere that some variation of the above cited process may be currently happening in the Mediterranean Sea itself, although I offhand couldn't find any information to support that idea.Edited by Minnemooseus, : Add source footnote.Edited by Minnemooseus, : Added by edit#2.Edited by Minnemooseus, : Added "tropical latitude" sentence and broke final paragraph into two paragraphs.

Sort of. I think I'm right in saying that you don't always get clay or other detrital sediment. You do under the Med, but not so far as I know in every saline giant. Note too that it is not necessary for the types of deposition to strictly alternate: it would suffice to sometimes have more and sometimes less salt being deposited.Finally, if by "exposed" you mean not covered by water, than no.

If the surface of the salt is not uncovered by water, what is the process that deposits other materials between layers of salt?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

I read through all the posts in this particular thread and what surprised me is that no one really looked into the geographical positioning of the continents during the periods of time the salt has been formed. Since these things form over thousands of years it is inevitable that something the sizes of what you mentioned had to be pretty close to an ocean at the given time to create yearly floods from the ocean which would cover the territory and create the salt evaporation during the period of time.The salt thickness would be affected by the regions current weather and things like hurricanes, earthquakes and ect. during those years in various ways. First of the flooded area would be heavily affected if there was an earthquake in the vicinity which may have caused a large scale tsunami to occur making the flooded area have a lot higher water deposit. Secondly the general wetness of the year, rain of any kind, usually would have a lot lesser quantity of salt than water can hold, thus diluting the water vs salt content in the flooded area, also heavy rain would increase the body of the water, and possibly lead to it braking into nearby water sources, rivers and similar causing further dilution of the salt. Also the general temperature of the year would affect the speed of evaporation, especially if it is a more seasonal aspect.As for the area being covered in soil/rocks and ect. there could be several explanations for that too, I'm not very familiar with the geographical aspects of the particular locations but we have very similar explanations as in the events that got the salt there in the first place, first of all floods and such, if the area was heavily flooded for several years in a row, without the water actually evaporating, the floods would bring layers of dirt, rocks and similar materials which being heavier would end up on the bottom covering the salt, in turn if this keeps being repeated through several years (well more like flood cycles but i cant think of a better term than a year in this case) the amount of dirt brought in would gradually stack up into quite thick layers. Also this would inevitably affect the flooded territory, since it would be losing a part of its depth because of the new layer of dirt there, the water would expand into wideness, covering new ground, and once drying up it would retract taking some extra soil with it, perhaps even leaving a small amount of salt where it previously has been but being washed off by rain later on.Also winds play an important role in this, strong winds, especially in levels like a tornado, would raise quite a lot of soil, rocks, and similar material into the air which could in turn be spread into the body of water creating a bedding of soil.Also a potential possibility is a washing off of a hill/mountain formation, where the water gradually eats off the base eventually causing it to collapse and bring a lot of materials into it.As i said I'm not familiar of the geographical locale of the phenomena but that's several reasons that could cause it. Also since after the deposits of soil have been made the salt deposits vanish, it is safe to assume that the climate or the circumstances that caused the flooding changed thus in return leading to no more salt depositing but instead bringing on more dirt which over decades created a thick layer and perhaps caused the prevention of the flooding all together.I know most of what i said are mere speculations, and i cannot point out the specific cause for either of the mentioned locations, but hopefully it might pop an idea to you who actually know the stuff.Also forgive if my paragraphing is a bit erratic.

Ah ... aqueous ones.There's lots of ways for mud to get into water. Then it settles out.Now the difficulty with supposing that the water evaporates completely for each of the evaporite layers in your photo and similar rocks is that some evaporites out with greater difficulty than others. So each of the evaporite layers would start of with the readily precipitating minerals and then have sublayers with increasing difficulty of precipitation. And as we don't see this in the rocks in saline giants, this is probably not what we're looking at.It would seem, then, that in saline giants the muddy layers correspond not to times of no water, but times of much water, so that salt isn't precipitating out but mud continues to settle; the halite layers contain some mud, so we don't need to account for them as being times of no mud, but rather of much precipitation --- the more rapid the precipitation, the purer the halite.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.

I mentioned it here: Now it can be shown independently that these were the conditions under saline giants formed.There are a couple of problems with having a dry basin filled up by a tsunami.One is that that would imply complete evaporation, which doesn't seem to be the case (see my previous post on this thread).Second, it wouldn't produce nearly enough salt. 1 km of seawater will give you 14 m of salt. The "saline giants" are several kilometers deep. That would require a whole lot of tsunamis and without much deposition of other materials in between them.---Throwing your 2 cents in is of course a completely different form of sedimentation --- that would be what is technically known as fiscal deposition, which for some reason occurs mostly in public fountains.Edited by Dr Adequate, : No reason given.