More about salt

[click to enlarge]

Been looking around the internet for more on salt formations. It appears from all the cross sections that except where it is being formed on the surface it IS laid down as a layer just like all the other layers of the geologic column, so there's no reason to think it had any special origin. That is, the usual scenario of its having been on the surface millions of years ago forming just like any salt lake does today doesn't fit with its similarity to all the other strata -- at least its original similarity: Since salt doesn't behave like all the other sediments, that is, because it is lighter it does rise, and it is subject to dissolution as well, it may not remain in its original horizontality, but clearly originally it was just another layer like all the others.

The Flood scenario generally supposes sediment-heavy water that got deposited into layers -- the mechanism is not all that clear since there are a few different ways it could happen -- brought in on waves, or precipitated out of standing water among others, but whatever the mechanism they all got laid down originally in horizontal layers.

Apparently salt layers are laid down exactly the same way. But salt has the peculiar property of rising wherever it can find space to rise, which is the explanation for the salt domes that occur wherever there is a buried layer of salt. The salt domes can be huge, rising to near the surface and big enough to be occupied by mine tunnels and equipment.

I've had to learn that salt is a rock. Like all the other formerly water-soaked sediments that make up the layers of the geologic column it hardened into rock, hard enough to build with. I also learned that there are many different kinds of salts and they are mined for different purposes. Didn't know anything about the history of salt mining until now, or that I would probably not have had salt on my table if it weren't for modern mining techniques. Odd to think people ever went without salt.

Also found out about something called a karst formation. If the salt is exposed to certain kinds of conditions, certain temperatures or acidity of water, for instance, it may dissolve, even dissolve and run out of its layer, leaving a space into which the land above may sink. Depressions and basins are in fact very common in the areas of the huge salt layers.

But the main thing I want to get said here is that there's no reason to think salt rock wouldn't have been formed in exactly the same way all the other layers were, which of course was by the action of the Flood waters. In surface basins it is created by evaporation, and there also had to be evaporation even of the deepest layers of the Flood strata too as it all dried out, but the idea that it had once to be a surface basin, as current geology assumes, isn't necessarily so.

In reading about all this, first you have to ignore the ridiculous flat-out assertions about the AGE of the formation -- talk about interpretation being treated as if it were fact! Then you have to ignore all the time-determined labels for the layers {Jurassic etc.} -- or translate them if you can, because all that is just evolutionist bias imposed on the facts to make the facts hard to recognize. Why can't they describe formations in terms of their actual properties? Why do they prefer this obfuscating terminology? Because they HAVE to make us all believe what they believe because they have no actual science, just hypothesis after conjecture after assumption after supposition. Does science behave that way? If it's a layer of sandstone a hundred feet thick beneath six other layers of other kinds of rock, use a word that gets that across, the time-frame mystification doesn't serve the lofty claims of science.

Evidence that it wasn't originally a basin: Looking at the cross sections of salt giants you usually see a basin formation but you ALSO see layers of OTHER sediments laid down OVER the salt, and NOT the way wet sediments would be laid down if the basin were already there, because they follow the contour of the sides of the basin rather than settling into the lower part. In the diagram above it appears there was some settling, somewhat more sediment apparently collecting in lower levels, suggesting it wasn't completely hardened when the sinking occurred, but still the layer as a whole follows the contour of the basin showing it was already there and the whole stack sank together.

This phenomenon can be seen wherever there is a cross section of layers -- the layers were ALREADY there, naturally laid down horizontally, being made of wet sediments, and then after some hardening had occurred, then and only then was the whole stack affected, whether by uplift or sinking or buckling or canyon cutting or whatever. That's true in the Grand Canyon and it appears also to be true in the various salt formations. Yes I know there is the question of reef formation associated with them in some cases, and that fits better with the slow evaporite theory, but since in general the whole picture fits the Flood layering scenario the reefs have to fit into that somehow.

The way the salt domes rise straight up through all the layers is further evidence that they were all laid down at the same time. If the layers had been laid down a bit at a time over the multiplied millions of years all those time-period labels stand for we wouldn't be seeing the domes rising so straight up through them all; starts and stops and displacements would be more likely.

The layers were there first, and this is also true wherever you see a deep salt layer among them. In fact, the diagram at top, the cross section of the area of the Gulf of Mexico, suggests that first the layers were laid, then there was a breach of some sort, or the area that became the gulf sank -- and the south end of the salt layer rose right in the middle of the gulf where there seems to have been a break, cutting off the other layers to the north and south and making what is really a gigantic salt dome out of the entire end of the salt layer. The whole south end of the salt layer obviously rose in one action through all the layers at once as the entire area sank under the Gulf.

I thought at first that Dr. A was saying a saline giant, that is, a deep salt layer, was itself four kilometers thick, but I see by the diagram above that he must have meant that it is LOCATED very deep but in itself it's just a layer like all the other layers. In the diagram you can see the fingers that push up through the other layers above it, which indicate the formation of "salt domes" as salt rises, being lighter than the other layers.

As I was looking up more information about salt it occurred to me that Dr. A might have in mind the depth of a large salt dome rather than the entire layer. I found out that Morton Salt runs a mine within a large salt dome -- a huge dome that rises from some kilometers deep almost up to the surface, but the salt layer itself as not particularly deep, was laid down at that depth and has many other sedimentary layers over it. The huge dome that was formed at the south end of the layer in the diagram above would be kilometers deep as well.