Some abstract art piece here looks more like a 18th century book cover design, but the curvy hair-thin black line in the middle tells you that it is actually a Landset 5 satellite image of--something. This is Dasht-e Kavir, or Great Salt Desert, Roughly 300 kilometers (200 miles) east-southeast of Tehran. It looks dry now, but the area had once been covered by ocean of such a scale, that evaporation of it left behind halite and other rock salt 4 miles thick. The overlying rocks happen to be soft enough for low-density salt to rise, forming diapirs. Geologists have identified about 50 large salt diapirs in this region. The geology is further complicated by faults and folds running though the region (as in fig 2), identified by Callan Bentley, a geologist at Northern Virginia Community College. Bentley describes the landscape as a “a palimpsest tale that helps constrain the age of the diapirism to pre-folding.”
Posted on: Tue, 08 Apr 2014 19:00:00 +0000