Rock Salt for Dummy Geology Students

Salt dome cross section

The freelancers who wrote for eHow.com, bless their greedy little hearts, were constrained by many a formatting rule – sadly, much more so than they were constrained by any demand for accuracy. One of those constraints was minimum word count, and in the process of gilding the lily and/or padding to meet that count, many a writer managed to introduce significant dumbassery to their posts. That's the case in the post "How Is Rock Salt Formed?" that Henri Bauholz (also known as Hank Nielsen) wrote for eHow, now migrated to Sciencing.com by Leaf Group.

The answer's relatively simple, and Henri danced around it, finally getting close enough for an answer a fifth-grader would count as correct:

"Rock salt is found in old ocean sea beds that have long ago dried up..."

The redundancy of "ocean sea beds" notwithstanding, we suppose that would satisfy a middle-school earth science teacher. Of course, a good teacher might want to know why the "ocean sea" dried up, and a geologist would point out that neither "ocean sea" – think Great Salt Lake – or "dried up" is quite correct. Rock salt (and other evaporite minerals) will precipitate from water whenever the salinity exceeds a specific percentage; "drying up" is not absolutely necessary; but, we suppose, close enough for government work.

Given the need to pad his answer to meet the minimum word count (191 words, total), Bauholz introduces some factoids. For instance, "The scientific name for rock salt is halite, and its chemical formula is NaCl or sodium chlorine." Well, no, the chemical formula is sodium chloride. And there's the process by which evaporated salt(s) become sedimentary strata: "...through the long process of geologic aging, the salt layers are covered with marine sediments..."

Ummm, yeah, Henri, "geologic aging": did you know that pair of words appears on the internet only 455 other times? Not what we'd call state-of-the-art terminology... and finally, this marvelous explanation of salt domes:

"Since halite is a very light mineral, it often 'punches up' through heavier sedimentary rocks to create salt domes near the surface of the earth."

Bauholz cribbed that factoid from a half-assed explanation of salt domes written by a volcanologist (i.e., someone who doesn't know a whole lot about sedimentary rocks). Where Henri went wrong is substituting the phrase "halite is a very light mineral" for "halite is less dense"; neither of the writers had anything to say about the plasticity of salt layers, which is essential to the formation of salt domes (as well as salt swells, pillows, and anticlines). Oops...

So what's left? well, Henri messed up the chemical formula, invented a new term, and confused density with weight; thereby demonstrating a lack of credibility. That's precisely the sort of writing that's earned him two previous Dumbass of the Day awards; to which we hereby add this, Mr. Bauholz's third.

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