Facebook -[ Ссылка ]
Website - [ Ссылка ]


The Khewra Salt Mine (or Mayo Salt Mine) is located in Khewra, north of Pind Dadan Khan, an administrative subdivision of Jhelum District, Punjab Region, Pakistan. The mine is located in the Salt Range, an outer range of the Himalaya Mountains which rises from the Indo-Gangetic Plain. It is Pakistan's largest, the world's 2nd largest. 

The mine is famous for its production of pink Himalayan salt, and is a major tourist attraction, drawing up to 250,000 visitors a year. Its history dates back to its discovery by Alexander's troops in 320 BC, but it started trading in the Mughal era. The main tunnel at ground level was developed by Dr. H. Warth, a mining engineer, in 1872 during British rule. After independence, the Pakistan Mineral Development Corporation took over the mine, which still remains the largest source of salt in the country, producing more than 350,000 tons per annum of about 99% pure halite. Estimates of the reserves of salt in the mine vary from 82 million tons
The Khewra Salt Mine is excavated within the base of a thick layer of highly folded, faulted, and stretched layer of Ediacaran to early Cambrian evaporites of the Salt Range Formation. This geological formation consists of a basal layer of crystalline halite, which is intercalated with potash salts. This basal layer is overlain by gypsiferous marl, which is covered by interlayered beds of gypsum and dolomite with infrequent seams of oil shale. These strata are overlain by 200 to 500 meters (660 to 1,640 ft) of Neoproterozoic to Eocene sedimentary rocks that have been uplifted and eroded along with the Salt Range Formation to create the Salt Range at the southern edge of the Pothohar Plateau. The Ediacaran to early Cambrian evaporites of the Salt Range Formation have been thrust southward over Neoproterozoic to Eocene sedimentary rocks by many kilometers, which would have tectonically incorporated of fragments of the underlying younger strata within these evaporites. The Salt Range is the southern edge of a well-described fold-and-thrust belt, which underlies the entire Pothohar Plateau and developed south of the Himalayas as a result of ongoing collision between India and Eurasia.

Palynomorphs, organic microfossils, have been used to make inferences about the ages of the Salt Range Formation and its salt layers that are exposed within the Khewra Salt Mine. For example, while working with Geological Survey of India in the 1930s and 1940s, Birbal Sahni reported finding evidence of angiosperms, gymnosperms and insects inside the mine which he regarded as originating from the Eocene period. However, on the basis of additional geologic data, later research has concluded that these palynomorphs were contaminants
#SardarInPakistan #KhewraSaltMine #PunjabiLehar

свернуть