Moab Geology Run

Geologist John Mears explains the extraction of potassium chloride (potash) from a natural spring near the Kane Creek Potash Mine

Transcript

00:00 comes out of a potash rich area here but it meets overflow from the ponds here

00:04 and so right in this little area here that the potassium salts crystallize out

00:08 so you could pass these around and that's just a crystal form of what's

00:12 forming in those ponds.

00:15 Can you lick it?

00:17 It tastes really bad.

00:19 You'll be thirsty the rest of the day.

00:21 How is this not good?

00:23 There's just a little outcrop of potash up here where the

00:29 spring comes through it and it's bringing natural potassium salts out in

00:33 the water and it mixes with a little bit more potassium here and it gets it to a

00:37 high enough grade it's actually precipitating out those crystals here.

00:41 So that background on the board kind of refers to the ice age.

00:47 Yeah, so it's just salts precipitating.

00:51 Super cool.

00:53 Cool, huh?

00:55 So, curiously, they wanted a salt like ink or something and this was available to do that.

01:03 You know, like preserve it.

01:05 Yeah, this is potassium chloride.

01:10 What we use as salt is sodium chloride.

01:13 Yeah, it's a totally different salt and it reacts totally different with your body.

01:18 Like I say, if you were to eat some of this you'd be extremely thirsty for the next couple of days

01:22 because your body would be trying to deal with a salt that it's not used to having in it.

01:26 Your body is used to having sodium chloride in it.

01:28 It's not used to that potassium ion.

01:30 Your body reacts totally different.

01:32 You'd be quite ill for a while.

01:34 But it's important that we get the potassium in our bodies, but we need to get it in different ways.

01:41 Plants take it up into the plant structure and we get it through the plants.

01:45 Bananas and things like that.