One of the largest salt mines in the world exists under Lake Erie

https://apnews.com/article/cleveland-salt-mine-winter-road-0daf091e3d56f65766bcf6a597683893

by 1659447091 • 4 months ago

70 50 4 months ago

What 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• 4 months ago

Out 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• 4 months ago

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. People shouldn't get punished for asking questions.

defrost• 4 months ago

Evaporative ponds account for millions of tonnes per annum ... and that's just from two sites:

* https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/anz/western-australia...

* https://australianminingreview.com.au/features/dampier-salt-...

yetihehe• 4 months ago

When 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

"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."

bcjdjsndon2• 4 months ago

That'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• 4 months ago

The largest salt mine in the world is under Lake Huron: https://www.compassminerals.com/who-we-are/locations/goderic...

bregma• 4 months ago

Sure. 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.

IAmBroom3• 4 months ago

FTFA: "decades of supply", just under Erie.

Wow.

cr1895• 4 months ago

Would highly recommend the book "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky. I never realized how influential salt was to the course of human history.

contingencies2• 4 months ago

Everything 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• 4 months 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.

therealdrag02• 4 months ago

My 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!

vasco2• 4 months ago

Salt 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• 4 months ago

Plus it rehabilitates your lungs to be in a salt mine for a long time.

It what?

fhars• 4 months ago

The only earthquake that happened in the region I am living during my lifetime was caused by a collapsing salt mine, though. (Small magnitude. I only heard about it because I was working at a particle accelerator lab at the time and the machine crew observed some beam instability caused by the ground vibrations, so they talked about it.)

citrin_ru• 4 months ago

Salt mines are safe as long as you are careful to keep water and salt separated. If people operating a mine (or maintaining a closed one) are negligent or incompetent or under-invest into maintenance bad thinks can happen, especially in a wet climate - water will dissolve salt and not only in/around the mine itself but in underground salt layers connected to the mine which can span tens of kilometers away from the mine.

AngryData• 4 months ago

Salt mines are generally pretty stable because if they weren't stable they would be full of water and and not worth the effort to try and mine.

It could be a potential problem in some areas but salt domes are so numerous that nobody really bothers with less-than-ideal ones for mining.

wewewedxfgdf• 4 months ago

Reminds 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=CmHpNTYYWcM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_iZr2-Coqc

observationist• 4 months ago

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• 4 months ago

Windsor 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

mauvehaus• 4 months ago

The 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• 4 months ago

If 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.

pfdietz3• 4 months ago

There'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.

bcjdjsndon2• 4 months 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

pfdietz3• 4 months ago

I think there's a regulation that anyone within a certain distance has to show informed consent, and the distance is set generously.

thom• 4 months ago

I 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• 4 months ago

It has always amazed me that the US is so unusually rich in a variety of natural resources.

IAmBroom3• 4 months ago

Southern 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• 4 months ago

Is 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.

loufe2• 4 months ago

In 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/

buckle8017• 4 months ago

Did 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

loufe2• 4 months ago

I 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.

bediger4000• 4 months ago

If 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/

It's worth your time and money, unless you have a particularly vivid imagination. You ride a skip 600 feet down.

therealdrag02• 4 months ago

Is all our salt mining and run off making ocean saltier?

One of the largest salt mines in the world exists under Lake Erie

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