Permo-triassic salt provinces of Europe, North Africa and the Atlantic margins tectonics and hydrocarbon potential / Пермо-триасовая соленосные провинции Европы, Северной Африки и Атланческой окраины. Тектоника и углеводородный потенциал

Humans need salt to live. A person eating a diet rich in red meat typically gets all the salt he needs from food, but a person eating only vegetables and grains does not. When people began settling into agricultural communities, they needed salt for themselves and their livestock. Furthermore, vast quantities of salt were needed to preserve food, especially fish. Salt was therefore one of the most prized commodities of the ancient world. The most common way to get salt was through evaporation of brine, derived from seawater or saline springs. In a warm climate this evaporation could be done by the sun, but elsewhere it required boiling brine over a fire. Producing salt in this way was fuel- and labor-intensive, but was required for a civilization to grow. The need to produce salt led to a variety of technical innovations, including the first use of natural gas, used to boil water for salt production in China by about AD 200. Saltworks were ubiquitous, even in colder climates. The Anglo-Saxon word for a saltworks was wich, meaning that most places in England whose name ends in wich at one time produced salt (Kurlansky, 2002). <...>