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This historical narrative traces the steps to unravel, over a span of 40 years, an extraordinary event in which 5% of the dissolved salt of the oceans of the world was extracted in a fraction of a million years to form a deposit more than 1 million km 3 in volume. A buried abyssal salt layer was identified with reflection profiling and sampled during the Deep Sea Drilling Project, Leg 13. The dolomite, gypsum, anhydrite and halite in the drill cores paint a surprising picture of a Mediterranean desert lying more than 3 km below the Atlantic Ocean with brine pools that shrank and expanded by the evaporative power of the sun. The desert drowned suddenly when the Gibraltar barrier gave way. The explanation of ‘deep-basin, shallow-water’ desiccation and the notion of a catastrophic Zanclean flood had a mixed reception. However, the hypothesis became broadly accepted following subsequent drilling expeditions. Nevertheless, as experts examined the evaporate facies and sequences of equivalent age in the terrestrial outcrops, weaknesses appeared in the concept of repeated flooding and drying to account for the magnitude of the deposits. The ‘Rosetta Stone’, used to decipher conflicting interpretations, turns out not to be the deposits but the erosion surfaces that enclose them. These surfaces and their detritus ‐ formed in response to the drop in base level during evaporative drawdown ‐ extend to the basin floor. Evaporative drawdown began halfway through the salinity crisis when influx from the Atlantic no longer kept up with evaporation. Prior to that time, a million years passed as a sea of brine concentrated towards halite precipitation. During the later part of this interval, more than 14 cyclic beds of gypsum accumulated along shallow margins, modulated by orbital forcing. The thick salt on the deep seabed precipitated in just the next few cycles when drawdown commenced and the brine volume shrank. Upon closure of the Atlantic spillway, the remnants of the briny sea transformed into salt pans and endorheic lakes fed from watersheds of Eurasia and Africa. The revised model of evaporative concentration now has shallow-margin, shallow-water and deep-basin, deep-water precursors to desiccation.

Formation of microlaminated sediments in solar salt works along the Mediterranean coast in southern France only occurs within a restricted salinity range of 60–150 gl−1. These salinities are associated with development of a laminated cyanobacterial mat composed primarily of the filamentous cyanobacteria Microcoleus chthonoplastes interbedded with detrital laminae. Transplants of the cyanobacterial mat to a less saline zone (36–60 gl−1) indicated that the cyanobacterial mats failed to colonize the less saline waters due to herbivorous snails and competition for light from floating algal masses of Cladophora and Enteromorpha. Neither the snails nor the Cladophora and Enteromorpha masses are tolerant of salinities above 60 gl−1, and therefore the Microcoleus mats are restricted to those areas of the solar salt works with these higher salinities. Analyses of salinity, conductivity, dissolved oxygen and pH in shallow salt pans (with salinities of 60–150 gl−1) established a relationship between the daily development of oxygen supersaturation and cyanobacterial photosynthesis. Sediments are unlaminated in those portions of the solar salt works where there are no cyanobacterial mats. These mats are frequently drained of their overlying water, and thus desiccation cracks divide them into polygonal plates. The development and translocation of these plates is enhanced by gas bubbles which form under the surface of the mats. No correlation between the microlaminae in sections from two cores located approximately 1 m apart was observed. This was consistent with the hypothesis that the surface of the desiccation crack polygons can be removed by currents and redeposited on the top of other cyanobacterial mat polygons. This process results in a ‘patchwork quilt’of young and old cyanobacterial mat polygons with an irregular microlamination pattern. The presence of such an irregular pattern of laminae permits an important distinction to be made between sediments associated with stromatolite formation and those associated with the very fine and horizontal varved sediments of stratified (meromictic) water bodies. The sedimentological significance of these observations is reviewed in relation to the processes of stromatolite genesis.

The Poacher's Point Formation is located within the Etosha Pan, northern Namibia. It contains Pleistocene stromatolites, ooids and silica nodules. The stromatolites were constructed by cyanobacteria in very lowenergy lacustrine conditions. The internal structure of the oncoids is complex and subdivided into shells by unconformities. Each unconformity-bounded shell probably represents stromatolite growth during a distinct lacustrine event. Shallower conditions are represented by colloform growth and deeper water by smooth oncoid mat morphology. The unconformities represent hiatuses of unknown duration. At least six stromatolite growth shells are recognized. Silica concretions which may have developed during shallowing lake stages are also present. The lack of clastic material in the carbonate lithologies suggests that the lake waters may have accumulated from collecting rainwater or have been spring fed. The lowest bed of the succession is a saline clay which represents a seasonally flooded salt pan deposited in an arid to semi-arid climate similar to that of today. The overlying carbonates represent sedimentation during a series of transient lacustrine events, representing intermittent wetter periods. Finally, due to progressive aridity, the lacustrine succession was terminated by calcrete development.

Layered evaporites can accumulate in: (1) ephemeral saline pans, (2) shallow perennial lagoons or lakes, and (3) deep perennial basins. Criteria for recognizing evaporites deposited in these settings have yet to be explicitly formulated. The characteristics of the ephemeral saline pan setting have been determined by examining eight. Holocene halite-dominated pans (salt pans) and their deposits (marine and non-marine) from the U.S., Mexico, Egypt and Bolivia. These salt pans are typified by alternating periods of flooding, resulting in a temporary brackish lake, evaporative concentration, when the lake becomes saline, and desiccation, which produces a dry pan fed only by groundwater. The resulting deposits consist of alternating layers (millimetres to decimetres) of halite and mud. The layers of halite are characterized by: (1) vertical and horizontal cavities, rounded crystal edges and horizontal truncation surfaces, due to dissolution during flooding; (2) vertical ‘chevrons’ and ‘cornets’ grown syntaxially on the bottom during the saline lake stage; (3) halite cements (overgrowths and euhedral cavity linings) and disruption of layering into metre-scale polygons, produced during the desiccation stage. The muddy interbeds are characterized by displacive growth of halite during the desiccation stage. Immediately below the surface of the pan the halite layers are ‘matured’ by repeated episodes of dissolution and diagenetic crystal growth. This results in porous crusts with patches of ‘chevron’ and ‘cornet’ crystals truncated by dissolution, clear diagenetic halite cement, and internal sediment. These layers of ‘mature’ halite closely resemble the patchy cloudy and clear textures of ancient halite deposits. Holocene salt-pans are known to cover thousands of square kilometres and cap halite deposits hundreds of metres thick, so they are realistic models for ancient evaporites in scale, e.g. Permian Salado Formation of New Mexico-Texas, which preserves many primary salt-pan features.

Summary Beds of fairly pure to impure dolomite, varying in thickness from 1 mm to 1 ft., occur widely throughout a large part of the Salt Flats of the Great Salt Lake Desert in Western Utah. Most of the sediments studied evidently formed within the past few tens of thousands of years (as dated by C14 methods), during late Lake Bonneville and Recent time. Alternating dark and light layers of dolomite, carbonate-bearing clays, and clays make up the upper few feet of sediment that was sampled. Dark layers however, are significantly higher in silicates plus SiO2, content and have approximately twice as much Mg2+ as the light layers. The writers suggest that the process of dolomite-formation was hastened by elevated temperatures, occasioned by solar absorption through a saltcrust “window” over the salt pans. Results of this study indicate that the dolomite is possibly of secondary origin (replacement type). Enough information is not available at this time in order to determine the duration of diagenetic dolomitization in terms of days, weeks or years, nor is it known if the diagenetic alteration of calcite to dolomite occurred at the sediment-water interface or after burial (or both at different times).