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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.)
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.
That's why they made you sign the waiver obviously
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcWRO2pyLA8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmHpNTYYWcM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_iZr2-Coqc
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.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Salt_Mine
"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."
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
* https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/anz/western-australia...
* https://australianminingreview.com.au/features/dampier-salt-...
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.
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!
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.
It what?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halotherapy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speleotherapy
The damp (salt is hydrophilic) walls of the mine could, over time, act as pretty effective passive filters for microscopic particles in the air.
Meanwhile, the city's air is just loaded with particles from all the coal/wood/etc. being burned as fuel.