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(For now, I have no idea where exactly this pan was taken - it's on an alluvial fan near Salar Grande in the Atacama Desert, N. Chile. More when I can find the GPS logs!) |
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Located in the Atacama Desert (n. Chile), this salar ("salt flat", essentially) produces enough mined salt to account for the domestic consumption of Chile plus a few million tons for export.
The lower parts of the salar are essentially pure NaCl (rare, geologically speaking - usually there's a lot of other salts mixed in)... the top forms this rough, bumpy texture and is covered with millions of years of dust. This is a 360 view (at least - had to take out 2 columns of photos that overlapped) from a few hundred feet into the salar itself. No need to walk further - this is what it all looks like.... |
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Near the top of a debris fan deposit. Lots of rocks, a few dry gullies, not much else... |
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Heading towards the top of this fan deposit, sampling along the way.
Along the left edge of the pan, the debris fan terminates at a fault scarp at the base of the nearby ridge (the fault scarp is several hundred feet high, although that's really not visible here). |
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(at least, that's the best guess I can make for the name of these peaks from Google Earth). |
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Standing on a ridge made of Jurassic volcanic deposits (lavas, mostly likely) in the Atacama Desert... the white rocks are small salt deposits marking the location of ancient briny springs. |
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View of Salar Grande ("big salt flat", basically), from a little ridge lying west of the deposit.
This particular salar is extremely pure (99.9% NaCl), which is rather rare for this type of deposit (they're usually 'contaminated' with other salts as well). Mines in the Salar export several million tons of salt per year as well as satisfying the domestic need for salt. |
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I wanted to come up with a clever title, but really can't -- rocks, dust, mountains, salt... it's the Atacama. |
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Examining volcanic rocks deposited in an alluvial fan. Salar Grande (a large salt deposit) is visible in the distance on the left side of the pan. |
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These ridges are Jurassic aged volcanic deposits that represent earlier Andes volcanism (the current Andes are a few hundred km further east).
The outcrops of these volcanic rocks are also the source material for the debris fans we're studying in this series of pans (you'll see a few geologist shadows now and then). Left half of this attempted 360 is http://gigapan.org/viewGigapan.php?id=13543 - which shows the debris fan and the geologists... |