Steinsalz und Kalisalze: Geologie

Abstract

SALT deposits are of surpassing interest from many and varied aspects. The details of their depositional succession, their complexity and association, and the post-depositional changes which they have undergone provide a vast series of physico-chemical problems which have furnished material for the classic researches of van't Hoff and a host of others. They are of no less interest to the geologist, who examines in them the record of those rarer episodes in the earth's history when the customary sequence solid-to-solution was reversed. Besides, salt, because of its great chemical and physical reactivity, is the most temperamental of rocks. So soon as it is laid down it is liable to be dissolved, transported, modified by solutions from above or below, and this any number of times. If it is involved in folding of the crust or tectonic events of any kind it reacts like no other rock; instead of folding as other rocks do, it flows, and under continued pressure it may become unstuck from its associates, penetrate higher levels of the crust in intrusive fashion as diapirs and salt plugs and may even flow out on the surface as salt glaciers. Countless surprises are possible if salt deposits are members of a rock series the geological history of which is at all lively.

Steinsalz und Kalisalze: Geologie

Von Prof. Franz Lotz. (Die Wichtigsten Lagerstätten der "Nicht-Erze", Band 3, Teil 1.) Pp. xxvii + 936. (Berlin: Gebrüder Borntraeger, 1938.) 84 gold marks.