Salt production technologies
Three distinct technologies are used to produce salt, but most in North America comes from rock salt mines.
Oceans cover most of the Earth. They always have. The salt in the oceans, today and in geologic eras past, is the salt we use today.
We use three basic technologies to obtain our salt.
- From the oceans and saline lakes (e.g. Great Salt Lake, Dead Sea, Caspian Sea, Issak Kul in Kyrgyzstan, Lake Eyre in Australia and Chilwa in Malawi), we extract solar salt, often called “sea salt.”
- From underground deposits of ancient ocean beds now covered by varying depths of soil (and water – many large salt deposits lie beneath the ocean floor), we obtain salt in two ways: Rock salt (geologically, “halite”) is produced by excavating a shaft allowing miners to access the salt deposit to chip or blast it into pieces small enough to haul to the surface
- and evaporated salt (sometimes called “refined salt”) is produced by solution mining the underground deposit and removing the water from the saline brine pumped to the surface.