WhizzbangK.C.
Pumping in the summer, however, may actually add to the surface salt layer. The pumped water would be warmer, and able to carry more salt per volume without being fully saturated. A mostly dry salt flats would also not dilute it further. The warmer water, and warmer air, would create accelerated evaporation on the surface, which would quickly result in an over-saturated condition and salt precipitation onto the surface, where we need it to be. We've all seen how fast a few inches of water can evaporate after a summer rain when the sun and wind hits it. If this water was saturated with salt when it was put on the flats, just imagine what would happen. It seems like it would at least be worth some testing to see what would happen. Heck, put a dike a few inches high around an acre or so and pump brine onto it for a bit. See what happens. Couldn't be too hard to accomplish for a proof of concept experiment.
I think you are on the right track with that observation. As I have mentioned before in these discussions there are two ways to change the salt saturation level in the pumped brine. Evaporation and temperature change. When temps are high and winds are present, evaporation is high but the higher temperatures make the salt more soluble (ie the saturation can actually drop as the brine heats up and water is evaporated.) Cooling the brine also will increase the saturation as solubility goes down with temperature.
So the ideal situation would be to pump hot brine over the highway and then let it concentrate by both evaporation and cooling. That would cause the maximum amount of salt to crystallize and precipitate out of solution. If the salt brine was allowed to concentrate in a solar warming pond prior to being pumped and pumped intermittently in the late afternoon, you would create that situation as that brine cooled over night.
The only way to refine the process to get the maximum amount of salt to drop out of solution as halite crystals is to do some testing with some small test areas as you mentioned.
For example build two small dikes that extend from the road near lands end all the way to the highway to form a small concentrating pond south and west of the lands end where brine could be pumped and allowed to concentrate in the summer time, then when it reaches full saturation, instead of pumping it, open a sluice gate in the dike and let that super saturated brine flow by gravity out onto the salt. It would also raise the local water table near that dike and saturated brine would wick to the surface near the test pond and evaporate on the surface, leaving behind its salt payload.
I would bet one of the Utah colleges would be happy to set up a test recovery operation using graduate students in geology and chemistry to manage such a restoration test.
You can learn more in one summer with some small test ponds like that on the north side of the highway than you could with several multimillion dollar "studies".
Once you get that salt out onto the crust on the north side of the highway into the test ponds, then during the winter the precipitation would actually work for you instead of against you by redistributing that local salt build up out over the racing surface.
Doing those tests there south of lands end on the mud flats to the highway would also restore salt in one of the places we need it most on the southern end of the international race course and the high traffic area at lands end.
Just like a farmer tending irrigation a single person or small team of a few students could observe and manage that sluice gate in the test pond dike so that the water was only released in amounts that could quickly evaporate and deposit a sheet of salt onto that nearly barren area of the flats.
We need to pressure BLM to approve testing on recovery methods. Stop talking about doing something and actually try a few things. We might get a pleasant surprise, and find an effective method to restore the salt quickly.
