Methods of Mining Salt
Since ancient times, salt has been considered very precious. Centuries ago, rock salt from the Sahara desert was so valuable that it was exchanged pound for pound with gold. Many trade routes on almost every continent were set up in order to trade salt. There are two major ways of salt mining. The first is evaporating the water from brine (salt water) and collecting the salt that is left. Salt miners can also scrape the salt off the bottom of a dried up salt bed and sell it for rare items. This process is called “dragging and gathering”. The Arabs from North Africa called the dried salt bed a sebkha. Even today, if you look at a map you would still see the names of some major sebkhas.
The second way to mine salt is by mining inside the earth. This is the salt that remained from ancient oceans. It can be found on almost all continents of the world. The way to get this salt is called a room-and-pillar mining. When shafts are built, the miners dig or drill the rock salt so that there is a room that salt from around it can be collected. They are taken out as huge blocks, or slabs, that are then refined into usable salt. The only problem with that way of mining is that a lot of the salt is left behind to make the pillars that keep the room standing. Rock salts can also be found in salt domes. Salt domes are upwellings of salt concentrations that are the result of geological pressures, which originate in the earth’s crust. No matter which way you mine the salt out of the earth, the result is the salt that we have come to know and love.