Salt polygons and porous media convection
Salt polygons and porous media convection
From fairy circles to patterned ground and columnar joints, natural patterns spontaneously appear in many complex geophysical settings. Here, we investigate the origins of polygonally patterned crusts of salt playa and salt pans. These beautifully regular features, approximately a meter in diameter, are found worldwide and are fundamentally important to the transport of salt and dust in arid regions. We show that they are consistent with the surface expression of buoyancy-driven convection in the porous soil beneath a salt crust. By combining quantitative results from direct field observations, analog experiments, and numerical simulations, we further determine the conditions under which salt polygons should form, as well as how their characteristic size emerges.
Lasser, Jana
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Nield, Joanna M.
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Ernst, Marcel
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Karius, Volker
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Wiggs, Giles F.S.
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Threadgold, Matthew R.
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Beaume, Cédric
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Goehring, Lucas
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24 February 2023
Lasser, Jana
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Nield, Joanna M.
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Ernst, Marcel
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Karius, Volker
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Wiggs, Giles F.S.
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Threadgold, Matthew R.
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Beaume, Cédric
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Goehring, Lucas
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Lasser, Jana, Nield, Joanna M., Ernst, Marcel, Karius, Volker, Wiggs, Giles F.S., Threadgold, Matthew R., Beaume, Cédric and Goehring, Lucas
(2023)
Salt polygons and porous media convection.
Physical Review X, 13 (1), [011025].
(doi:10.1103/PhysRevX.13.011025).
Abstract
From fairy circles to patterned ground and columnar joints, natural patterns spontaneously appear in many complex geophysical settings. Here, we investigate the origins of polygonally patterned crusts of salt playa and salt pans. These beautifully regular features, approximately a meter in diameter, are found worldwide and are fundamentally important to the transport of salt and dust in arid regions. We show that they are consistent with the surface expression of buoyancy-driven convection in the porous soil beneath a salt crust. By combining quantitative results from direct field observations, analog experiments, and numerical simulations, we further determine the conditions under which salt polygons should form, as well as how their characteristic size emerges.
Text
PhysRevX.13.011025
- Version of Record
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Accepted/In Press date: 25 January 2023
Published date: 24 February 2023
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
We thank Grace Holder (Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District) for support at Owens Lake, the U.S. National Park Service for access to Death Valley (Permit No. DEVA-2016-SCI-0034), and Antoine Fourrière and Birte Thiede for their work on preliminary experiments on convection. TLS processing used the Iridis Southampton Computing Facility. The 3D numerical simulations were carried out on ARC4, part of the High Performance Computing facilities at the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. M. R. T. was supported by the Leeds-York-Hull Natural Environment Research Council Doctoral Training Partnership Panorama under Grant No. NE/S007458/1. Sua Pan work was funded by Natural Environment Research Council (Grant No. NE/H021841/1), World University Network, and Southampton Strategic Interdisciplinary Research Development Funds, and enabled by Botswana Ministry of Environment, Wildlife, and Tourism (Permit No. EWT 8/36/4 XIV) and Botswana Ash (Pty) Ltd.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 authors. Published by the American Physical Society. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Open access publication funded by the Max Planck Society.
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 475402
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/475402
ISSN: 2160-3308
PURE UUID: 35933463-cb27-4f54-bb70-6da914ac060b
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Date deposited: 17 Mar 2023 17:30
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 03:12
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Contributors
Author:
Jana Lasser
Author:
Marcel Ernst
Author:
Volker Karius
Author:
Giles F.S. Wiggs
Author:
Matthew R. Threadgold
Author:
Cédric Beaume
Author:
Lucas Goehring
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