Salt of the Earth (on salt domes and beds)

So again, let me ask some questions.The image I believe you are referring to is from the Detroit Salt mines. That is a bed (actually several beds separated by hundred of vertical feet) that extends under much of America and Canada.Is this an example of a saline giant (or more likely a succession of such critters).

---

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

Yes. If it comes from Detroit, then it's part of the Michigan Salt. This was formed during the Silurian when North America had an inland sea. During this time the Michigan Basin was almost but not quite completely surrounded by reefs (which are still present in the geological record). So the Michigan Basin formed a shallow sea-within-a-sea with only a few narrow channels connecting it to the main sea. Here's a map. Moreover Michigan would have been closer to the equator and the Silurian was generally warmer. So all round you've got a nice situation for evaporite formation. Salt water would flow in, fresh water would evaporate out.Obviously the influx of salt water can bring with it some other sediments such as fine clay.

Okay.So next question is related to the layering.What is the mechanism that explains the layering?

---

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

Now, in the other thread Dr.A had asked me how saline giants could have formed during a global flood. I initially figured the same mechanism secular science used could also have happened during the flood, and that this probably could go on to be a worthwhile explanation.There were, however, some problems with this, one of them being that they would have formed during the last stages of the flood, meaning they should be on the top of the sedimentary layers. This is not the case. Not only that, but it could never produce 4 fm of salt.So I viewed the problem from another perspective. Maybe slow evaporations of vast amounts of water isn't the only way to produce something like that. Afterall, all it does is raise the concentration in the water to saturation, and at that point it precipitates to the bottom. But this isn't the only way to have mineral precipitate. Lowering the temparature of the water also causes precipitation. And I envisioned that if you had a very hot, mineral-saturated water current meeting a cold water current, you could probably get a very impressive amount of precipitation.And of course, the flood model does have huge amounts of such hot water coming out of the earth's crust.And so with a little research, it turned out that this is plausible mechanism, as I found at least one paper suggesting this mechanism forming the Messinian salt:Dietz, R.S. and Woodhouse, M., Mediterranean theory may be all wet, Geotimes 33(5):4, 1988.Which I couldn't find a way to access, unfortunately. I'm on a university servor so I know there are some sites that would let me access scientific papers freely, but I can't seem to find one.I found this from them, where the abstract reads: http://www.springerlink.com/content/70664516434k3162/Which, after searching what 'brine' meant (yeah a new word), seems to be about what I had been thinking about.So I guess the question is this, would there be any difference between a precipitite and an evaporite ? How could we recognize the two ? (I guess they answered this in their paper, but we would need to access it in order to know for sure)

Maybe not that impressive. From the Halliburton Services Cementing Technology Manual, 1993 edition, we find the following solubilities for salt:
at 0 degrees C - 26.28% by weight
at 50 C - 26.83%
at 200 C - 31.6%
at 400 C - 46.4%So let's do some cocktail-napkin calculations, assuming that the heat capacity of salt solutions is the same as that of fresh water (which it ain't - it will drop with increasing salt):100 tons of 400-degree salt -saturated water + 100 tons of zero-degree fresh water will yield 200 tons of 200-degree water with 23.4% (46.4 tons divided by two hundred) salt. That will all stay dissolved, as 31.6% is saturation.100 tons of 400-degree salt-saturated water + 700 tons of zero-degree fresh gives 800 tons of 5.8% brine at 50 degrees C. Still all soluble. And 50 C is still on the warm side for fish.Also, the solubility of calcium sulfate (gypsum) actually increases a bit as water gets colder. This would make it pretty tough on the "precipitite" mechanism as a way to explain all the mixed salt/gypsum beds out here in West Texas.Note: sorry for the obscure citation. I worked for Halliburton back then, and I can assure you that they probably copied the table they published from somewhere, perhaps the International Critical Tables, with no attribution at all.

I also just thought of something else.Creationist will say evaporites formed during the flood, which they put as starting around the cambrian layers. So it predicts that no giant salts would be found bellow.Meanwhile, secular science proposes a mechanism that make another prediction. At any point in earth's history large bodies of water could have been seperated from the ocean and form an evaporite. Therefore there shouldn't be any difference in the proportion of evaporites above or bellow any specific layer.Anyone have the world-wide distribution of salt giants, in regards to their depth in the layers ?AbE I am now not totally sure the cambrian is where creationist place the pre-flood/post-flood boundary. Seems to be some disagreement over where it should be placed. Still, the creationist model predicts there will be a layer where giant salt distribution above and under will be significantly different. Just have to search what that layer would be in the creationist models.Edited by slevesque, : No reason given.

I'll be honest, I think mixing two mineral-filled water solutions is probably much more complicated then that. In fact, I've been told chemical engineering is one of the hardest branches of engineering.In fact, research on google of 'mixing brines precipitation' seems to only show me results that precipitation will occur, which is the opposite of what your over-simplified calculations show here.mixing brines precipitation - Recherche GoogleThis is because it isn't simply salt-saturated water meeting fresh water, it's a saturated water of a boatload of stuff, meeting seewater which also has minerals dissolved in it.PS Gypsum apparently could also precipitate: http://aapgbull.geoscienceworld.org/...ent/abstract/66/3/363

I'm sorry but exactly what evidence has ever been presented for that assertion?Second, what is the mechanism that allows those alleged hot water sources to create a series of layers such as we find?Once you answer those two questions we can go one with the thousands of other observations that totally refute the Biblical Flood.

---

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

Sure, mixing brines can cause all kinds of precipitation. I deal with exactly that every day in oil field brines, and they don't have to be all that concentrated to cause problems from that precipitation. I see barium sulfate, calcium carbonate, and gypsum all the time that formed that way. And you are correct: "mixing two mineral-filled water solutions" is devilishly complicated, and there are some pretty elaborate computer programs based on hundreds of man-years of lab work to help predict what falls out of solution when.But that's not what you are trying to explain, Slevesque: you have posited hot, very salty water that mixes with cold water and drops fairly pure sodium chloride, and then ends up resembling sea water after the solids have dropped out. Seawater has even less salt than my 50-C example above. Saturated hot brine meeting cold something-like-seawater may well precipitate something - gypsum, calcium carbonate, strontium and barium sulfate - but halite = sodium chloride is not going to be what falls out.

From that abstract:
"These criteria are based on (1) comparison of observed evaporite fabrics with similar fabrics in modern and other ancient examples, and (2) interpretation of how observed evaporite processes would effect fabrics in different settings."- my emphasis

Please let me get this straight, even though it is OFF TOPIC here.Are you claiming that the Biblical Flood starts at the Cambrian period?This really is important.

---

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

* coughs *This is not strictly true, for a couple of reasons. First, the longer anything has been around, the more chances it has to be destroyed by erosion, subduction, metamorphosis, et cetera. Pretty much anything will be rarer below any given layer than above it^*. Formation in the past <> survival to the present. * With the exception of things which would be more abundant when the interior of the Earth was hotter, such as komatiites. But this is by-the-by.Second, the saline giant we've just been discussing (the Michigan Salt) was formed because of enclosure by reefs. This is clearly not something that could have happened before the evolution of reef-forming organisms. So there was at least one mechanism for evaporite formation not present in the early history of the Earth.Finally, it's not clear how much salt there was in the early oceans. If it started small, then evaporite formations in the early oceans would have been correspondingly more difficult.Nonetheless, as the article shows, there are surviving pre-Cambrian evaporites, some of impressive size.

The biblical scholars put the flood very close to 4,350 years ago.The Cambrian was over 500 million years ago.Does not this slight discrepancy bother you at all? Or is that just how it is in creation "science?"

---

Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.

Looking at that sample, it seems all to have a halite luster, suggesting that halite deposition wasn't actually coming to a stop. The fact that the darker layers were thinner suggests to me that what was varying most was the deposition of halite rather than of clay.That's the most I can get out of the photo itself --- it would be nice in addition to know the scale of the bands relative to the inferred average rate of deposition of halite (which I'd have to look up). The photo looks to me to be magnified somewhat, but that's just a gut feeling.Now there are all sorts of things that would cause the rate of halite deposition to vary. In the very short term, there might have been a portion of the barrier which was overtopped during spring tides (perhaps combined with particularly rough seas). In the short term, a particularly cold year (or series of years) or a hot one, or a particularly rainy or arid year would have changed the rate of halite deposition. In the short-to medium term, changes in the channels as they silt up and erode (generally, narrow channels are better for halite deposition because they prevent mixing). The ease of flow out into the Ohio Basin would also have played a part. In the longer term fluctuations in sea-level would have affected the cross-section of the channel, again affecting mixing.So there are lots of variables that would affect the rate of halite deposition, and we should not be surprised to see that it fluctuates.

Does this help?

---

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