A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1367 entries
saltpan
A saltpan is a flat expanse of salt crust left on the floor of a basin where standing water has evaporated. The surface is hard, blinding white, and often patterned into polygons a few feet across, pushed up at the edges where the growing crust has nowhere to expand. After rain, it becomes a shallow lake, dead flat, and reflects the sky so completely that the horizon disappears.
Etymology
The word is a plain English compound and it borrows from the trade: A salt pan was the shallow vessel or the walled enclosure in which seawater was evaporated to make salt, and the natural feature was named for its resemblance to the industrial one. The same is true of salina, which named the works before it named the landform.
Notes
The polygon cracking is the same geometry that produces mudcracks, and the raised edges come from crystal growth pushing against the neighbors. Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia is the largest, over four thousand square miles and flat to within about a meter across its whole extent, which makes it the reference surface used to calibrate satellite altimeters.