Salty Mountain EarthCache

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The formation of a salt dome starts where Seawater is trapped in a basin (in this case what remains of the basin is what we now call the Gulf) where the water evaporates leaving the salts behind. The formation of these salt domes took place during the Pre Cambrian and Cambrian periods.
In order to produce the vast quantities of salt required for a salt dome to form usually requires many repetitions of the evaporation process. Salt Domes then form as the buried salt slowly rises to the Earth's surface, deforming and piercing the overlying layers of rock. Over time, layers of salt are buried by successive layers of sediment. The weight of these upper layers subject the lower layers to increased pressure. But since salt cannot be compressed, it begins an upward migration along faults in the sub-surface geology. As the salt slowly flowed upwards, it deforms the overlying rock layers to produce domed structures. With ongoing upward migration, the salt dome eventually breaks through these structures, sometimes incorporating large blocks of the host rock into the salt body and carrying them upwards. Eventually the dome breaches the surface to produce the characteristic dome-shape which can be seen as Jebel Dhanna.