One of the largest salt mines in the world exists under Lake Erie | Hacker News Reader

One of the largest salt mines in the world exists under Lake Erie

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Reminds me of the Lake Peigneur disaster in 1980 in Louisiana when an oil drilling rig entered a salt mine located under the lake.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcWRO2pyLA8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmHpNTYYWcM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p_iZr2-Coqc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Peigneur

30 minutes of grainy 80s footage in those links - I think it's better to provide at least the wiki link in any sort of discussion forum. If you're on discord or a chat, videos might be the norm, but forums/threaded discussions are text native, so it's better to provide a link to a text resource.

And it's crazy that a 14 inch hole into the salt mine resulted in all that chaos.

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.

> The risk of sinkholes or deformation from future collapse is always there, although not specifically for us as we are too far away

That's why they made you sign the waiver obviously

I think there's a regulation that anyone within a certain distance has to show informed consent, and the distance is set generously.

The thing about active mines is that they expand. I’m not saying you should be concerned, but “it’s a mine away” is just a single data point

This mine is only allowed to expand under the lake, precisely because of concern about subsidence.

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?

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.

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. People shouldn't get punished for asking questions.

Evaporative ponds account for millions of tonnes per annum ... and that's just from two sites:

* https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/anz/western-australia...

* https://australianminingreview.com.au/features/dampier-salt-...

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."

That's insane. These spill heaps always end up killing people, all so the mining company didn't have to pay to dispose of it.

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

It is apparently contaminated/not pure enough and refining it isn't financially viable compared to mining it from more pure deposits (according to the german wikipedia page)

Would highly recommend the book "Salt" by Mark Kurlansky. I never realized how influential salt was to the course of human history.

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.

> connect various dots without going all dry

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.

The same can be said for, well, 101-level class attendees.

People love to declare themselves experts on things; thus: the Expert Fallacy ("I know a lot about repairing carburators; let me tell you what is wrong with self-driving cars...")

shallow, incomplete views of nuanced topics

Having studied (and written) histories myself, this sounds like an accurate description of histories in general. We don't need to make everything an encyclopedia. Sometimes it's fun to follow a conversational review of a breadth of material without getting in to the weeds. Kurlansky often includes personal anecdotes and has a good sense of where to dwell. This is what I appreciate in a writer: character and tact.

In my undergrad I did a grad course on advanced mine ventilation, modeling the fluid dynamics of clearing out blast gasses from a room and pillar salt mine in Southern Ontario. The company had reached out to the professor a year or two ago asking for help understanding why it took so long for blast gasses to clear (which is obviously something to minimize). I was pretty proud I was able to reproduce the measured air velocities with my model, but while preparing my presentation at the end of the semester, I read the a month before I started my project the mine had switched to road headers (mechanical rock breaking, appropriate only in soft rock mines like salt, potash, and coal) and so my research, while interesting, seemed a little pointless.

They have some really unique challenges in salt mines, for those who enjoy reading into it. "Les Îles de la Madelaine" in the St. Lawrence seaway is a kitesurfing destination with an absolutely incredible salt mine, for anyone curious[1].

#1 - https://amq-inc.com/en/mines-seleine-quebecs-only-salt-mine/

Did you reach out to the mine directly?

likely they switched because of the time, but if your model could help reduce the time I bet they wouldn't have switched

I bet the decision had been made many months before. If they had started operations already they would have needed to invest probably millions in the equipment purchase, worker training, and so on. IIRC I had asked my prof and he didn't seem to be interested in investing the effort into presenting our findings, but never really elaborated further.

Kind of fun thinking back, but hopefully they weren't betting the farm solely on some university professor's at-his-pace work.

The largest salt mine in the world is under Lake Huron: https://www.compassminerals.com/who-we-are/locations/goderic...

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.

FTFA: "decades of supply", just under Erie.

Wow.

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.

If one is into that kind of thing the Valley Camp, docked in Sault Ste. Marie, MI is a museum ship open to the public, too.

It has always amazed me that the US is so unusually rich in a variety of natural resources.

Southern Missouri, at the exposed roots of crust that formed the Ozark Mountains, is alone responsible for significant amounts of the world's metals. It used to provide 80% of the world's lead, for instance.

Like almost all mining areas, the people are poor, undereducated, and damaged healthwise (lots of lead there!).

Is it unusually rich for any region that big? I don't actually know, but it'd be interesting to see a comparison to another similarly sized country.

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).

If you're ever in central Kansas, which I personally do not recommend, you can take a tour of a salt mine under Hutchinson, KS.

https://underkansas.org/

It's worth your time and money, unless you have a particularly vivid imagination. You ride a skip 600 feet down.

Windsor Salt, is mined from under lake erie in Windsor, Ontario. You used to be able to do a tour.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windsor_Salt_Mine

My initial reaction was fear.

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!

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.

> Plus it rehabilitates your lungs to be in a salt mine for a long time.

It what?

Like victorian doctors prescribed sea air for healing. When it didn't work they prescribed country air.

These treatments work best in conjunction with sunlight, which is unfortunately lacking in salt mines.

Not a terrible idea really: Victorian times were also when the industrial revolution was happening, and unregulated coal plants and factories were belching out unimaginable amounts of pollution into city air. Getting away from that mess and breathing clean air probably was good for you if you had health problems.

The joke is they send people someplace else, and when it doesn't work they send them back. Guessing most city dwellers could not afford a doctor or resting up on the countryside or beach.

Halotherapy / speleotherapy, pseudo science. Not harmful but probably just placebo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halotherapy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speleotherapy

The comparison I'd make is between a small section of an inactive salt mine with some people in it, and a "modern" city from a century or two ago.

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.

I mean clean air is definitely good for you and a salt mine is probably cleaner than a city

There’s a reason the saying goes “back to the salt mines.” It’s just a generally pleasant place that people love to be in.

Indeed. There is an ancient saying "the children yearn for the mines". Why would this be a saying if it weren't good for them.

I believe it's a disservice to science to say something doesn't work when there's not enough data yet. I know of a few cases of mines with many people swearing by them and the research I've read said "inconclusive, needs more research", not that "it doesn't work". There's meta studies available: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6435215/

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.

Salt mines are generally pretty stable because if they weren't stable they would be full of water and and not worth the effort to try and mine.

It could be a potential problem in some areas but salt domes are so numerous that nobody really bothers with less-than-ideal ones for mining.

Is all our salt mining and run off making ocean saltier?

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