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Detroit's salt mine: City beneath the city
- ggm 7y agoCosmic say detector? Offline storage? Salt is pretty stable, maybe glassified radioactive waste?
- fenwick67 7y agoFunny enough, Portal 2 takes place in an old Michigan salt mine
- webpaymentsguy 7y agoThe scientific applications are endless!
- ggm 7y agoZisss.. could eeeeesssssily be solved viss.... a komputer!
- bilegeek 7y agoInterestingly, in real life there are no salt mines in Upper Michigan, where the main Enrichment Center is located. There are plenty of other mines, though. Maybe all of those old test chambers were vitrified in salt instead of just concrete, come to think of it...
- hadlock 7y agoThere's a 14 mile underground submarine communications system in upper Michigan. Despite being hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean, it could contact submarines all over the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Sanguine At it's peak the system used ~3MW power plant to run the system.
- janzer 7y agoJust a note that while there are[1] 3 transmission lines of 14, 14 and 28 miles in the UP, the lines themselves were mounted on (essentially) telephone poles. The end of each line does have 1 to 3 miles of buried horizontal ground wire though and an array of 100 to 300 foot deep bore holes. [1] or at least were; the project was shutdown in 2004 and while the paths of the antenna lines still seem to be visible on satellite photos[2] it looks like the lines themselves may have been removed. [2] The transmission station itself is at https://goo.gl/maps/q5BwduBqbBpAaf1L9 https://goo.gl/maps/q5BwduBqbBpAaf1L9 with the 28 mile antenna segment running roughly north south just to the west, one 14 mile segment running east-west a little to the north of the facility and the second to the south.
- RodgerTheGreat 7y agoI played Portal 2 for the first time while working on my MS at Michigan Tech, in Houghton. It was a memorable moment to listen to that Cave Johnson audio log and then turn away from my monitor to look out the window at the nearby defunct copper mines.
- notlukesky 7y agoThe convenience of the location is great. Lots of salt is needed to deice all the roads in the Detroit/Michigan area. The main purpose of the salt there is for deicing. Saves a bunch on transport costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_salt_mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_salt_mine
- redis_mlc 7y agoRoad salt destroys cars, but hey, Make Detroit Great Again (MDGA)! The drawback with sand is that it doesn't dissolve in water, so silts everything up.
- danans 7y ago> (MADA) Make America Detroit Again?
- walrus01 7y agoNext Robocop reboot?
- mayneack 7y agoFaster degradation of cars on the road might be an upside for Detroit.
- saberdancer 7y agoWhat is the alternative? Roads that become icy probably destroy cars as well, although in a more pinpoint kind of way. At least road salt doesn't cause a lot of fatalities.
- kijin 7y agoElectric coils under the pavement to keep the surface temperature above freezing. Unfortunately most cities can't afford it, least of all Detroit.
- 7y ago
- Scoundreller 7y agoI like what appears here to be an overhead-electric system catenary system: https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/01/20/PDTN/dd7f14d1-937d-4f68-9ecd-862a32908773-27.jpg?width=1280 https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/01/20/PDTN/dd7f14d1-...
- angry_octet 7y agoHow has this not been turned into an underground bunker city? https://youtu.be/ybSzoLCCX-Y https://youtu.be/ybSzoLCCX-Y
- pugworthy 7y agoIs there urbex down there? Seems pretty tempting.
- danans 7y agoI went down to these mines on a school field trip as a child 30+ years ago. I can almost remember it like it was yesterday, even the smell, and the surprising warmth despite it being the dead of winter outside. I kept a chunk of salt I brought back under my bed for years after that.
- dmix 7y agoNeat. How did you enter the mine?
- danans 7y agoThere was an elevator
- chipperyman573 7y agoWhy did it have such a significant impact?
- danans 7y agoWell, I was about 8 years old, so it was just ... neat I guess. In a creepy movie kind of way. I remember it being very yellowish but maybe that was the color of the lights. Also I've never been in a mine since then.
- altcognito 7y agoIt was a common "field" trip for kids in the Detroit area. I went as well, and yeah, there was something very pleasant about the trip. I imagine it was notable for the fact you didn't get a ton of field trips, much less to one with giant machinery down a rickety elevator with an element of danger.
- myself248 7y agoI took such a trip too! Here's what I remember: The elevator car was very small, and we were packed in, nose-to-buttcheek, since I was quite small myself at the time. Oy. It was only closed at the bottom -- it was shaped like a hot air balloon basket, with the upper sides open. We kids were strictly admonished to not even try to touch the sides of the shaft as they went by, though I don't think I could reach that far up anyway. Our ears popped several times on the way down. The ride to the bottom took over a minute, which seemed very long for an elevator not stopping at any other floors! The ride down was dark, which gave our eyes time to adapt. Once we reached the bottom, the mine seemed bright, although the light level was probably quite low in absolute terms. I remember the light fixtures being attached to the ceiling, drilled straight into the salty rock. There were vehicles down there! This blew my mind, and even at the young age, I recognized them as older style vehicles, Jeeps and such which had been down there for years. I have no idea how they were kept from rusting immediately. The air tasted of salt. Everything was covered in salt dust. We were given a ride on a vehicle of some sort, I don't remember if we were in the back of a Jeep or on a trailer hayride-style, but we covered quite some distance into the mine. The room-and-pillar system was pointed out, and we got to see the conveyor bringing salt from the active face being mined at the moment, though we didn't get close to the active room itself. They let us grab some lumps of salt to bring them home. Whatever you could fit in a backpack to ride the elevator back up, is what I was told. Some of those samples made it into my rock collection, some are still in my memory-box. I don't know what became of the others, but I was using one as a paperweight in elementary school. I don't know why they closed the mine to tours, but it's a great loss to education. Obviously experiences like that are transformative to a young kid! In the years since, I've oft wondered if the exceptional stability of that geological formation might make it good for other sorts of uses. Archive storage, or perhaps it's the "secret undisclosed location" where important people scuttle off to when bad things happen. The size of the mine, several miles and with extents under four cities, is remarkable. It's surely expanded further since this map was made: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/solstice/sum99/salt1.jpg http://www-personal.umich.edu/~copyrght/image/solstice/sum99...
- josteink 7y agoI don't get any article, only this banner about the EU version > Welcome to The Detroit News’s EUROPEAN UNION EXPERIENCE Anyone got a link working outside the US?
- modo_mario 7y agohttps://archive.ph/YRBZ8 https://archive.ph/YRBZ8
- tiborsaas 7y agoLink is broken, it redirects to the .eu subdomain :(
- XiS 7y agoFor the EU people: https://archive.ph/YRBZ8 https://archive.ph/YRBZ8
- jve 7y agoYeah, by default redirects to root URL for EU users.
- Someone 7y agoThey call it ”Welcome to The Detroit News’s EUROPEAN UNION EXPERIENCE” https://eu.detroitnews.com/EU-learn-more/ https://eu.detroitnews.com/EU-learn-more/ has more info. Apparently, they claim/think they can’t show you a direct URL without setting a cookie. Well, it _is_ progress relative to “can’t let you in”, but where do these kind of policies come from?
- eps 7y agoGives a cert mismatch warning (with a Cloudfare cert) and then show 403 / Forbidden.
- tom_mellior 7y agoWorked for me.
- odensc 7y agoDo you happen to use CloudFlare's DNS (1.1.1.1)? They have quite a long-standing [1] issue with archive.is. (or the other way around depending on your opinion) [1]: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-1-1-1-1-not-resolve-archive-is/135223#135223 https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-...
- lorenzhs 7y agoIf you're using Firefox, also check whether you're using DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) with Cloudflare. It's in Settings -> Network Settings -> Enable DNS over HTTPS.
- colordrops 7y agoThe article mentions that the salt was originally used for food. I'm curious how, or if, they prevented contamination from things like machine oil or other artifacts of mining.
- kijin 7y agoSalt is often purified by dissolving it in water and precipitating NaCl back out. This process doesn't always make sense economically, so it's understandable that Detroit uses their own salt for deicing and imports food-grade salt from places where it's cheaper to make. Or maybe in the past they just didn't care about a bit of contamination.
- EducatorDirTeam 7y agoThe salt deposit is a relatively flat seam with an average thickness of 26feet
- krsdcbl 7y agoOn an aside, that automatic EU-page redirect has got to be one of the worst patterns I've seen so far as a reaction to gdpr ...
- jwr 7y agoI am honestly amazed at all the inane crap that the media throws at us. I guess a generic redirect to a generic "EU-page" is still better than putting up 5 popups in my face asking me to subscribe and set "cookie preferences" (which takes me to another 3 levels of windows with sleazy anti-patterns, and clicking "Save" displays a spinner for 3 minutes).
- usrusr 7y agoThat "three minute save spinner" is the most puzzling of all. There is absolutely no upside for the site owner in making the user wait pointlessly and it seems to be exclusive to US sites. European sites tend to be content just having that little unobtrusive "yeah right, it's fine" footer/header, perhaps with some color button trickery for steering users to the non-minimal option. Which isn't exactly nice but surely not a hill to die on. My guess is that those "three minute spinner" implementations are expensive third party compliance plugins that deliberately make the problem they solve look much harder than it actually is.
- jwr 7y agoI suspect the spinner and the wait, like the wild labirynth of confusing "options" you have to wade through, are all a part of a strategy to discourage people from clicking anything else than "yes, I agree to everything, use me in any way you desire, just show me the article". I think people who design and implement these sleazy dialogs should be ashamed of themselves.
- rmason 7y agoSeeing those pictures makes me feel so sad. My Dad worked in sales for Morton Salt. Morton's mine was across the river in Windsor, Canada. Dad went there on a regular basis taking clients down for tours. As a kid growing up I heard so many crazy stories about the place and I was intrigued. But you had to be sixteen to enter the mine so my Dad said I'd have to wait. I was so interested that when I turned fifteen I told him that I wanted to go down in the mine on my sixteenth birthday and he agreed. However that year there was a big collapse in a mine in Louisiana that was under a lake. An oil company got mixed up and drilled down into the mine. The water entered through the hole draining the lake. Though the workers miraculously survived the payouts by the insurance companies were huge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur#Drilling_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur#Drilling_disaste... So then the insurance companies, stunned by the large payouts, banned anyone who wasn't an employee from the mines. Seeing those pictures just brings back all the disappointment.
- hadlock 7y agoIn Colombia there's a great big salt mine just an hour outside of the capital city Bogota, Zariquipa, that has tours, they're ~$15. Highly recommend. It is low quality, darker salt, but it's pretty neat. Tickets to Bogota often run sub-$500 usd from the US if you shop around.
- whoopdedo 7y agoTypo; it's Zipaquirá. The mine dates back over 200 years and the main attraction is the Salt Cathedral. (My mother was born there.)
- rmason 7y agoI've got a college friend in Bogota. Now I have two reasons to go see him ;<).
- jspash 7y agoI visited the Wieliczka salt mine in Poland and it was incredible. It's full of sculptures and they have 2 chapels and a series of rooms to accommodate weddings. Well worth a trip if you're visiting Kraków as it's very nearby. GIS link: https://tinyurl.com/yx5amaux https://tinyurl.com/yx5amaux
- subpixel 7y agoIn Cleveland there is a similar mine that extends far out beneath Lake Erie. Always wanted to get a peek but visitation is practically verboten.
- madengr 7y agoThere is a salt mine in Kansas that has a good tour. https://www.underkansas.org/ https://www.underkansas.org/
- krzyk 7y agoFor other nice salt mines you can take a look at Wieliczka Salt Mine: https://www.krakowcard.com/blog/amazing-pictures-wieliczka-salt-mine https://www.krakowcard.com/blog/amazing-pictures-wieliczka-s... It was run since 13th century till 1996 Also another salt mine that was also used across many centuries lies just around the cordner: Bochnia Salt Mine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochnia_Salt_Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochnia_Salt_Mine).
- The_rationalist 7y agoReminds me of Duckburg
- InvisibleUp 7y agoI would love to see the remains of these used for underground food farms, like described here: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-46221656 https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-46221656 I'm not sure how well that would work alongside the existing salt mining operations, though.