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Figure 51. Zagros Salt Flows, where salt has breached the mountains it was forming and flowed out onto the landscape.3.159
Chemical erosion, river transport, evaporation, thick precipitates, burial, flow, and other related geological processes do not happen in human time frames. And they do not happen in small areas like the Dead Sea and the Great Salt Lake. These processes occur over giant areas and over extremely long periods of time.
The Mediterranean Sea provides an interesting example of how large areas of fairly thick salt can accumulate. Before the Straits of Gibraltar became a connection between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea, there were mountains isolating the basin from the Atlantic Ocean. The result was a much larger Dead Sea, where there was not enough water entering the basin to replace evaporation. As water evaporated, the ancient Mediterranean Sea became more and more salty. This is referred to by geologists as the Messinian Event, which occurred during the Messinian period of the Miocene epoch, approximately 6 million years ago.3.160
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paradoxes