Another history of the Earth. Part 2c

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

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The beginning of part 2

In the previous parts I talked about how the "Grand Canyon" in the United States was formed as a result of the disaster described in the first part, caused by a collision with a huge space object, and the runoff of a large amount of water, which the inertial wave threw into the mountains. Some of the readers asked the question, why was only one "Grand Canyon" formed? If this was a global process, then the entire Pacific coast of North and South America should be cut into canyons.

In fact, if we look at the Pacific coast of the Americas, we can easily find many traces of water erosion there, including canyons, only they are much smaller than the "Grand Canyon". For the formation of a giant structure, which is the "Grand Canyon", it is necessary to combine several factors at once.

First, a huge amount of water, which in the case of the "Grand Canyon" is due to the relief of the area, which is a giant bowl, the drain from which is possible only in one single direction.

Secondly, the presence of soil that will easily succumb to water erosion. That is, in hard rock, water is much more difficult to cut through a giant structure than in a layer of fairly soft sedimentary rocks.

In all other cases, which we observe on the Pacific coast, the combination of these factors did not occur. Either there was not enough water, or the surface of the Earth was harder. In the case when it was just a mountain ridge, then after the passage of an inertial wave, the water rolled back into the ocean not along one channel, as it was in the "Grand Canyon", but along many parallel streams, forming many gullies and small canyons, which are very are clearly visible on satellite images. In this case, the cutting of the surface will be only in those cases when there is a noticeable difference in height and the flow of water is fast enough. On more flat areas, or directly on the coast, where the relief is already quite gentle, which means the water speed will be much lower, there will be no deep gorges and canyons.

But if a giant inertial wave passed through the mountain systems of the Andes and the Cordilleras, then it is logical to assume that in addition to areas from which there is a flow of water back into the ocean, there must also be areas from which the flow of water back into the world ocean is impossible. And if sea water got into these areas, then mountain salt lakes, as well as salt marshes, should have formed there, since most of the water should have evaporated over time, but the salt should have remained.

It turns out that there are a lot of similar formations in both Americas.

Let's start in North America, where the famous "Great Salt Lake" is located, on the banks of which the famous "Salt Lake City" is located, that is, Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah and the de facto capital of the Mormon sect.

The large salt lake is a closed body of water. Depending on the amount of precipitation, the area and salinity vary: from 2500 to 6000 sq. km and from 137 to 300% o. The average depth is 4, 5-7, 5 m. Cooking and Glauber's salts are mined.

But that's not all. A little to the west there is another remarkable object. Dried up salt lake Bonneville. Its area is about 260 sq. km. The thickness of the salt deposits reaches 1.8 meters. The surface of the dried salt is almost perfectly flat, so there are two high-speed tracks on which races are held to set speed records. For example, it was here that the car exceeded the speed of 1000 km / h for the first time.

Between Bonneville and the Great Salt Lake there is a desert with a total area of more than 10 thousand square meters. km, most of which, as you probably already guessed, is covered with salt marshes or simply deposits of dried salt. But that's not all. This entire structure is part of the so-called "Great Basin" with a total area of over 500,000 sq. km.

It is the largest collection of drainage areas in North America, most of which are deserts or semi-deserts. Including such well-known as "Black Rock" and "Death Valley", as well as the salt lakes Sevier, Pyramid, Mono.

In other words, there is a huge amount of salt in this area. On the one hand, if we have an endless water body, then it is quite logical that the salt will gradually be washed away by water into the lowlands and form salt lakes and salt marshes there. But where did all this salt come from? Did it come out of the bowels of the Earth or was it brought here along with the ocean water by an inertial wave? If these are some internal processes due to which salt is released from the bowels of the Earth, then where are those primary deposits of salt, from where the water washes it into the lowlands? As far as I could find out, deposits of fossil salt on our planet are very rare. And here we see a huge valley and traces of salt all around, but at the same time I could not find any mention of fossil salt deposits in these areas. All salt production is carried out by the surface method from precisely those salt marshes and dried salt lakes that formed in the lowlands. But this is exactly the picture we should observe after the passage of the inertial wave, which should have left a large amount of salty sea water in this closed-drain area. The bulk of the water gradually evaporated, and the salt from the mountain ranges and hills was gradually washed away into the lowlands by rain and flood runoffs.

By the way, in this case it becomes clear why Bonneville, which once had a huge area, is now completely dry. The amount of water that is now entering this area with atmospheric precipitation is not enough to fill this entire area. It is only enough to fill the Great Salt Lake itself. And the excess water that formed Bonneville is the same sea water that was thrown here by an inertial wave, glass into the lowlands and gradually evaporated.

We can observe a similar picture in South America. There, too, there are both large salt lakes and huge salt marshes.

It is in South America that the world's largest salt marsh Salar de Uyuni or simply "Uyuni Salt Flats" is located. It is a dried-up salt lake in the south of the Altiplano desert plain, Bolivia at an altitude of about 3650 m above sea level, which has an area of 10 588 sq. km. The interior is covered with a layer of table salt 2-8 m thick. During the rainy season, the salt marsh is covered with a thin layer of water and turns into the world's largest mirror surface. When dry, it becomes covered with hexagonal crusts.

Please note that once again we have just a dried-up lake, since the available atmospheric precipitation is not enough to fill this lake with water. At the same time, salt there is mainly table salt, that is, NaCl, of which there is about 10 billion tons, from which less than 25 thousand tons are produced annually. In the process of mining, salt is raked into small mounds so that water can drain from them, and the salt dries up, since then it is much easier and cheaper to transport it.

20 km north of the Uyuni salt marsh, on the border of Bolivia and Chile, there is another large salt marsh of Koipas, whose area is 2,218 sq. km, but the thickness of the salt layer in it already reaches 100 meters. According to the official version of the formation of these salt marshes, they were once part of one common ancient Lake Ballivyan. This is how this area looks now on a satellite image. Above, we see a dark spot of Lake Titicaca. Below the center, in the middle, there is a large white spot, this is the Uyuni salt marsh, and just above it, a white and blue spot of the Koipas salt marsh.

Further south, in Chile, is the second largest in the world, after the Uyuni Salt Flats, the Atacama Salt Flats, which is located on the southern edge of the Atacama Desert, which is the driest on the planet. It receives only 10 mm of precipitation per year. Here is what Wikipedia tells us about this territory: “In some places of the desert, rain falls once every several decades. The average rainfall in the Chilean region of Antofagasta is 1 mm per year. Some weather stations in Atacama never recorded rain. There is evidence that there was no significant rainfall in the Atacama from 1570 to 1971. This desert has the lowest air humidity: 0%. The very low amount of precipitation is explained by the fact that from the east this territory is closed by a high mountain ridge, and from the west along the Pacific coast flows the cold Peruvian Current, which originates from the icy shores of Antarctica.

This raises a very simple question. If this region receives so little rainfall, how could lakes and rivers have existed there? Even according to the official version, there was a lot of water in that region only a few tens of thousands of years ago, which is practically yesterday by geological standards. It turns out that either there were no high mountain ranges blocking the wind from the east, or there was no cold Peruvian current, or it was not so cold, for example, because Antarctica was not covered with ice. But the age of the ice in Antarctica is estimated at 33.6 million years. That is, once again, if we consider the system as a whole, and not its individual parts, then ends and ends do not converge in any way.