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One of the largest salt mines in the world exists under Lake Erie
- SilverElfin 7mo agoWhat happens when they run out of salt? All the salt they put on the roads must end up back in the lakes but not in a way that is as easy to extract, right?
- kakacik 7mo agoOut of many worries about this world and its future, running out of salt is really at the bottom of the list. You can always extract it form the sea by mere evaporation like our ancestors did. Plus salt deposits in the ground all over the world are massive, we had salty seas for billions of years.
- jbstack 7mo agoNot sure why you're getting downvoted. People shouldn't get punished for asking questions.
- defrost 7mo agoEvaporative ponds account for millions of tonnes per annum ... and that's just from two sites: * https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/anz/western-australia/dampier-salt https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/anz/western-australia... * https://australianminingreview.com.au/features/dampier-salt-white-gold/ https://australianminingreview.com.au/features/dampier-salt-...
- yetihehe 7mo agoWhen that one mine runs out of salt? It will be closed. We as a humanity will not run out of salt, some places have the opposite problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Kali https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Kali "According to the Werra Potash Mining Museum in Heringen, Monte Kali has been in operation since 1976; as of August 2016, it covered 98 hectares (240 acres) and contained approximately 201 million tonnes of salt, with another 900 tonnes being added every hour and 7.2 million tonnes a year."
- bcjdjsndon 7mo agoThat's insane. These spill heaps always end up killing people, all so the mining company didn't have to pay to dispose of it. I mean, you could sell salt ffs why just dump it? And what happens when it rains, surely it's absolutely fucking that soil for years to come
- joecool1029 7mo agoThe largest salt mine in the world is under Lake Huron: https://www.compassminerals.com/who-we-are/locations/goderich-ontario/ https://www.compassminerals.com/who-we-are/locations/goderic...
- bregma 7mo agoSure. The largest is under Lake Huron. One of the largest is under Lake Erie. And they're both in the same massive salt formation. The same massive formation is also deep under Chicago, but too deep to mine practically. When I say massive, I am being conservative.
- IAmBroom 7mo agoFTFA: "decades of supply", just under Erie. Wow.
- cr1895 7mo agoWould highly recommend the book "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky. I never realized how influential salt was to the course of human history.
- contingencies 7mo agoEverything I've read by Kurlansky has been awesome. Big fan of the thematic history genre. Simply great stuff. Gives adequate scope for authors to connect various dots without going all dry or embellishment.
- gilrain 7mo ago> connect various dots without going all dry As long as you keep in mind that what you come away with are shallow, incomplete views of nuanced topics. Unfortunately, many come away from these popular summaries believing 101-level knowledge makes them subject experts.
- IAmBroom 7mo agoThe same can be said for, well, 101-level class attendees. People love to declare themselves experts on things; thus: the Expert Fallacy ("I know a lot about repairing carburators; let me tell you what is wrong with self-driving cars...")
- contingencies 7mo agoshallow, incomplete views of nuanced topics Having studied (and written) histories myself, this sounds like an accurate description of histories in general. We don't need to make everything an encyclopedia. Sometimes it's fun to follow a conversational review of a breadth of material without getting in to the weeds. Kurlansky often includes personal anecdotes and has a good sense of where to dwell. This is what I appreciate in a writer: character and tact.
- therealdrag0 7mo agoMy initial reaction was fear. But then I wondered if modern mining engineering is a solved problem? In that they mostly know how to make safe tunnels? Then I looked up how deep Erie is and it’s pretty shallow, with an average depth of 62 ft!
- vasco 7mo agoSalt mines in particular are of the safest kind in the whole world, they are super stable. It's a self supporting rock with enough plasticity that the whole thing doesn't crumble down. If you ever have privileged info of a huge earthquake happening, going into a salt mine is probably not the worst idea. Plus it rehabilitates your lungs to be in a salt mine for a long time.
- BugsJustFindMe 7mo ago> Plus it rehabilitates your lungs to be in a salt mine for a long time. It what?
- Hikikomori 7mo agoLike victorian doctors prescribed sea air for healing. When it didn't work they prescribed country air.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- mikkupikku 7mo agoThese treatments work best in conjunction with sunlight, which is unfortunately lacking in salt mines.
- shiroiuma 7mo agoNot a terrible idea really: Victorian times were also when the industrial revolution was happening, and unregulated coal plants and factories were belching out unimaginable amounts of pollution into city air. Getting away from that mess and breathing clean air probably was good for you if you had health problems.
- wewewedxfgdf 7mo agoReminds me of the Lake Peigneur disaster in 1980 in Louisiana when an oil drilling rig entered a salt mine located under the lake. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcWRO2pyLA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcWRO2pyLA8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmHpNTYYWcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmHpNTYYWcM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_iZr2-Coqc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_iZr2-Coqc
- observationist 7mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur 30 minutes of grainy 80s footage in those links - I think it's better to provide at least the wiki link in any sort of discussion forum. If you're on discord or a chat, videos might be the norm, but forums/threaded discussions are text native, so it's better to provide a link to a text resource. And it's crazy that a 14 inch hole into the salt mine resulted in all that chaos.
- adamgordonbell 7mo agoWindsor Salt, is mined from under lake erie in Windsor, Ontario. You used to be able to do a tour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Salt_Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Salt_Mine
- mauvehaus 7mo agoThe last chapter in the lives of a lot of Great Lakes freighters is hauling salt. Apparently it’s no better for ships than it is for cars. If you get a chance, the steamship Mather is docked near the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland. It was the flagship of the Cleveland Cliffs line, and was spared the fate of hauling salt. You can tour it, and if you book ahead, you can get an extended belowdecks tour that includes machinery spaces that you don’t see on the regular tour.
- EvanAnderson 7mo agoIf one is into that kind of thing the Valley Camp, docked in Sault Ste. Marie, MI is a museum ship open to the public, too.
- pfdietz 7mo agoThere's a salt mine mostly under Cayuga Lake in New York, in Lansing. When we bought our current house we had to sign a paper indicating we knew there was a mine somewhere near (underground about a mile to the north.) The risk of sinkholes or deformation from future collapse is always there, although not specifically for us as we are too far away. Development patterns change as you get to the area where the mine is: fewer (and older) homes, more commercial development.
- bcjdjsndon 7mo ago> The risk of sinkholes or deformation from future collapse is always there, although not specifically for us as we are too far away That's why they made you sign the waiver obviously
- pfdietz 7mo agoI think there's a regulation that anyone within a certain distance has to show informed consent, and the distance is set generously.
- move-on-by 7mo agoThe thing about active mines is that they expand. I’m not saying you should be concerned, but “it’s a mine away” is just a single data point
- pfdietz 7mo agoThis mine is only allowed to expand under the lake, precisely because of concern about subsidence.
- thom 7mo agoI spent part of my childhood in Winsford, a salt mining town in the UK (its other claim to fame being that it was where Neville Southall played before Everton). Every time I pass a yellow bin of salt for gritting the roads, I get to feel a little bit of nostalgia (before falling over because councils no longer have enough money to grit the roads and pavements).
- guidedlight 7mo agoIt has always amazed me that the US is so unusually rich in a variety of natural resources.
- aaron695 7mo ago[dead]
- IAmBroom 7mo agoSouthern Missouri, at the exposed roots of crust that formed the Ozark Mountains, is alone responsible for significant amounts of the world's metals. It used to provide 80% of the world's lead, for instance. Like almost all mining areas, the people are poor, undereducated, and damaged healthwise (lots of lead there!).
- mcmoor 7mo agoIs it unusually rich for any region that big? I don't actually know, but it'd be interesting to see a comparison to another similarly sized country.
- loufe 7mo agoIn my undergrad I did a grad course on advanced mine ventilation, modeling the fluid dynamics of clearing out blast gasses from a room and pillar salt mine in Southern Ontario. The company had reached out to the professor a year or two ago asking for help understanding why it took so long for blast gasses to clear (which is obviously something to minimize). I was pretty proud I was able to reproduce the measured air velocities with my model, but while preparing my presentation at the end of the semester, I read the a month before I started my project the mine had switched to road headers (mechanical rock breaking, appropriate only in soft rock mines like salt, potash, and coal) and so my research, while interesting, seemed a little pointless. They have some really unique challenges in salt mines, for those who enjoy reading into it. "Les Îles de la Madelaine" in the St. Lawrence seaway is a kitesurfing destination with an absolutely incredible salt mine, for anyone curious[1]. #1 - https://amq-inc.com/en/mines-seleine-quebecs-only-salt-mine/ https://amq-inc.com/en/mines-seleine-quebecs-only-salt-mine/
- buckle8017 7mo agoDid you reach out to the mine directly? likely they switched because of the time, but if your model could help reduce the time I bet they wouldn't have switched
- loufe 7mo agoI bet the decision had been made many months before. If they had started operations already they would have needed to invest probably millions in the equipment purchase, worker training, and so on. IIRC I had asked my prof and he didn't seem to be interested in investing the effort into presenting our findings, but never really elaborated further. Kind of fun thinking back, but hopefully they weren't betting the farm solely on some university professor's at-his-pace work.
- rob74 7mo ago[dead]
- bediger4000 7mo agoIf you're ever in central Kansas, which I personally do not recommend, you can take a tour of a salt mine under Hutchinson, KS. https://underkansas.org/ https://underkansas.org/ It's worth your time and money, unless you have a particularly vivid imagination. You ride a skip 600 feet down.
- therealdrag0 7mo agoIs all our salt mining and run off making ocean saltier?