Surface and subsurface characterisation of salt pans expressing polygonal patterns

Abstract

The data set described here contains information about the surface, subsurface and environmental conditions of salt pans that express polygonal patterns in their surface salt crust. Information stems from 5 field sites at Badwater Basin and 21 field sites at Owens Lake – both in central California. All data was recorded during two field campaigns, from between November and December, 2016, and in January 2018. Crust surfaces, including the mean diameter and fluctuations in the height of the polygonal patterns, were characterised by terrestrial laser scanner (Nield et al., 2020b), DOI 10.1594/PANGAEA.911233. The data contains the resulting three dimensional point clouds, which describe these surfaces. The subsurface is characterised by grain size distributions of samples taken from depths between 5 cm and 100 cm below the salt crust, and measured with a laser particle size analyser (Lasser and Goehring, 2020b), DOI 10.1594/PANGAEA.910996. Subsurface salinity profiles were recorded and the ground water density was also measured (Lasser and Goehring, 2020a), DOI 10.1594/PANGAEA.911059. Additionally, the salts present in the crust and pore water were analysed to determine their composition (Lasser and Karius, 2020), DOI 10.1594/PANGAEA.911239. To characterise the environmental conditions at Owens Lake, including the differences between nearby crust features, records were made of the temperature and relative humidity during one week in November 2016 (Nield et al., 2020a), DOI 10.1594/PANGAEA.911139. The field sites are characterised by images (Lasser et al., 2020), DOI 10.1594/PANGAEA.911054, showing the general context of each site, such as pictures of selected salt polygons, including any which were sampled, a typical core from each site at which core samples were taken and close-ups of the salt crust morphology. Finally, two videos of salt crust growth over the course of spring 2018 and reconstructed from time-lapse images are included (Lasser et al., 2020), DOI 10.1594/PANGAEA.911054.

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ORCID for Joanna Nield: orcid.org/0000-0002-2657-0525

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