I was flying into Salt Lake City last week and noticed an interesting landscape (photo above). After returning home I searched Google Maps and saw that this area was identified as "Compass Minerals":
"At our Ogden, Utah, location at the Great Salt Lake, we draw highly saline waters from the lake’s most remote areas into very shallow solar evaporation ponds to produce salt, sulfate of potash (SOP) and magnesium chloride."I wonder if the coloration is the result of minerals alone, or whether the ecology of the ponds supports some type of microbial or algal flora. Anyone know? [see the comments]
Addendum: Salt ponds in San Francisco Bay
Reposted from 2017 to add this photo of salt ponds in Senegal:
From a gallery of aerial photographs of Africa, posted by the BBC.
This would be a brine operation, where water's pumped into an area with that mineral, then pumped out and the water evaporated, so the color's coming from something else in that area. Salt, potash, and mag are usually white or grey. I'd be surprised if anything bacterial could survive in there - it would be like the Dead Sea times a thousand.
ReplyDeleteI think some of the African wetlands where flamingoes get their color from algae are hypersaline.
DeleteIt's possible, though I'd think Compass would want to control growth in their product - dead algae would make their produce stink when they bag it or sell it.
DeleteI've worked at a salt mine for years and have yet to see anything grow in the exposed puddles or brine ponds. But that's a based-on-personal-experience answer, not a scientific one.
It's probably archaea. That's the domain of organisms that gives the hot springs in Yellowstone their color and they're able to live in much more extreme environments than bacteria. I know they're what makes the halite from Trona, CA pink.
ReplyDeleteThe reddish color is often from Halobacteria -- extremophile archaea that have bacteriorhodopsin that gives them the red color. Another culprit is Dunaliella salina, a green alga that also has reddish coloring thanks to some carotenoids. There are also quite a few cyanobacteria that make a good living in salt ponds. I don't know of any microbial studies in those Utah ponds in particular, but we know a lot about these types of microbes from the San Francisco Bay and the Guerrero Negro salt ponds.
ReplyDeletePlease riddle me this: a friend won't eat Sea Salt because there is plastic in it. Could this be true? I've seen beach sand magnified /microscopic and it looks like another world.
ReplyDeleteThere is no salt in sea salt as the crystallisation process excretes impurities as the crystals form. Telling people there is plastic in sea salt is, however, a great way to market Himalayan rock salt.
Deletetypo alert: "There is no plastic in sea salt..."
DeleteAh yes, thank you. I should clarify that there certainly is salt in sea salt.
DeleteIt turns out I was wrong: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/08/sea-salt-around-world-contaminated-by-plastic-studies
DeleteIt's also in most of the world's water supplies: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/sep/06/plastic-fibres-found-tap-water-around-world-study-reveals
This is indicative, however that plastic is _everywhere_ and not eating sea salt is not going to make much of a difference.
Haha - I have to confess I was briefly counfounded by Andy's statement. Good stuff - no need to publish this, of course
DeleteI received the following comment in an email from a family member:
ReplyDelete"I will do a bit more checking of literature but here is what I know now: The salt in these ponds is quite different than sodium chloride so extremophilic archaea such as Halobacterium halobium are probably not the dominants as they need very high NaCl, at least 5x sea salt ( by memory). These ponds will also be alkaline and have more in common with African soda lakes. A variety of photoheterotrophic and photoautotrophic bacteria (typically purple in color) tolerate pH in the 8 to 10 range which seems about right based on chemistry, but not certain of their salt tolerance. I assume that the green ponds are less concentrated in salts and are dominated by eukaryotic algae. Again will check. I found some fabulous airplane shots of bright blue evaporation ponds that have little relationship to biology and will send also."
Good to know!
Deletehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_evaporation_pond#Algae_and_colour_of_evaporation_ponds
ReplyDeleteThank you, Guillaume for that link. I've appended an additional photo to the post and now have a topic to harvest for the photos in the next divertimento.
DeleteThere is a particularly impressive example in the desert in Xinjiang, China, near the former bed of Lop Nur: https://goo.gl/maps/uFwv5Yvyx5s. That particular one is a potash facility, I believe. Of interest are the canals you can see branching off from the north edge.
ReplyDeleteLook just west of Moab, UT.
ReplyDeleteEven the salt pans in Utah look vanilla compared to those in San Francisco.
ReplyDeleteAnd the way things are going there won't be salt ponds in Utah for very long. As usual, the human is incapably of not f*cking things up (I realize there are multiple things going on here but it all boils down to the same thing)
ReplyDeletehttps://news.yahoo.com/great-salt-lake-utah-disappearing-013714748.html
There aren't as many on the edge of the SF bay as when I was a kid 60 years ago for various reasons (e.g., returning them to bay tidal land). The ones in Redwood City were supposed to be returned to the bay but the Trump EPA (shock!) determined they were fair game for development (many thousands of homes [condos]). I forget how the feds are involved but IIRC the decision was reversed when a sane administration took over.
We have a natural "spotted lake" just south of us. https://www.mybestplace.com/en/article/spotted-lake-stunning-lake-filled-with-colored-circles
ReplyDelete-gem
https://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.com/2013/02/spotted-lake-british-columbia.html
Deletebut your link has better photos. Thanks.