Chemical Composition NaCl Crystal System Isometric Uses Winter road treatment, a source of sodium and chlorine for chemical processes, food preservation, seasoning. Find Other Topics on Geology. Maps Volcanoes World Maps. Colorless or white when pure; impurities produce any color but usually yellow, gray, black, brown, red. Mohs Hardness. Cleavage, solubility, salty taste The taste test is discouraged.
Winter road treatment, a source of sodium and chlorine for chemical processes, food preservation, seasoning. Rock and Mineral Kits. Are Water and Ice Minerals? Mohs Hardness Scale. Hardness Picks. Rocks: Galleries of igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic rock photos with descriptions. If you are requesting a locality be added, please only include significant locality occurences for the mineral.
About Minerals. Link Directory Donations Mobile Site. Chemical Formula. Sodium chloride. Colorless, white, red, yellow, orange, pink, blue, violet, green, and gray. May also be multicolored with a solid and clear color such as blue and white.
Crystal System. Crystal Forms and Aggregates. Crystals occur as cube s, sometimes distorted with hopper growths. Rarely occurs octahedral. Normally occurs massive , grainy , incrusting , as fibrous vein s, botryoidal , stalactitic. Large cubic chunks often break apart into cubic cleavage fragment s. Also forms as odd shaped rectangular crystal clusters and elongated scepters of cubic crystals. Transparent to translucent. Specific Gravity.
Other ID Marks. In Group. Striking Features. Salty taste, softness, and crystal formations. Evaporite deposits such as dry lake s and saline lake shorelines, sedimentary salt beds, and salt dome s. Rock Type. Popularity Prevalence Demand Common Salt. Mineral Salt. Natural Salt. Hydrohalite - Hydrohalite is not really a variety of Halite , but a very rare, similar mineral. Salt forms in shallow lagoons in hot areas but water has to have a really high concentration of salt for that.
Salt is an important industrial raw material. Halite is of course used in food but this is not the most important use nowadays. Salt is used as a principal source of chemical element chlorine. Chlorine gas and hydrochloric acid are the major products for which halite is a raw material.
Halite is used in agriculture fertilizer, weed killer, cattle feed stocks. Halite is extensively used as a road deicer in certain regions. Salt should be really inexpensive and widely available if it is used to keep roads ice free. Indeed, this is the case. Many raw materials like metal ores and crude oil are non-renewable resources which no doubt become more and more expensive in the future but this is not the case with salt.
We have more than enough of it for any need that may arise in the future. It is pretty safe to say that we will never run out of salt. However, in the past, things were different. Salt used to be very expensive commodity and certain cities in southern Europe especially Venice became rich because of salt trade.
Venice and even Roman Empire well before that used to make lots of money by selling salt before people learned that you can get salt by simply evaporating sea water in ponds. Nowadays salt is either mined, collected from evaporation ponds or pumped out from salt deposits. In order to do that, water is pumped into a salt deposit through a drill hole.
This water dissolves the salt to form a brine which is pumped out. The brine is either used directly by an industrial plant or pumped to an evaporation pond. Evaporation pond in Israel. White material in the background is salt. The Dead Sea is a salt lake between Israel and Jordan. Its surface is more than meters below sea level. You can not go lower than that on land but new record is set every year because the water level of the Dead Sea is constantly falling. The Dead Sea is hypersaline — every liter of water contains over grams of salt, mostly dissolved halite.
This is almost ten times more than in sea water. That increases the density of water 1. It is me on the picture above floating effortlessly in the water. Swimming in the Dead Sea is an interesting experience. I am used to cool lakes in northern Europe where swimming is really refreshing experience. If I were living next to Dead Sea, I would not go swimming there regularly. It simply does not make any sense. It gives no relief from hot weather and when you have even a tiny skin scratch somewhere it surely does hurt while trying to swim there.
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