The whole "mud flow covered the salt crust" statement has been taken as fact & it is totally INCORECT! Get your facts right before you throw your theories out. This whole situation is drowning in misinformation & untruths up to it's fu^^ing eyeballs!
The mud/dirt from the excessive rain runoff NEVER settled on the salt crust, it settled UNDER the crust! The crust that now varies from only about 1 inch at best down to just a skim of color, is now predominantly made up of the depleted tailings product being pumped back on to the flats & that product is now missing most of the binder, POTASH. A recent statement from Intrepid stated that only a small amount of their product was being harvested from the north side of the freeway & that's because it is about depleted.
Way back when Reily Investments started the pumping program I was suspicious why they would be so willing to spend millions of dollars on that but it only took a couple of years to see the truth. Initially the quantity of salt crust came up but then the quality went down. Since then both the quality & quantity have gone down to where we are today. In the near future my guess is their profit margin will go away & pumping will stop.
There is a crystalline solid area in the center of the flats where that mud/dirt layer was trapped for a time before it bled off into the surrounding brine dirt. I saw it when I tested last year & it's not there now. The product of that live crystalline section is the crust & the loss rate is far beyond the natural growth rate. I don't know how much area that covers but it's not very big. I only found it in two of my test holes last year about two miles apart.
Brenda Bowen stated that the loss was from various runoff & evaporation due to excessive wet weather. OK.... there was excessive wet weather as there has been for thousands of years before, BUT!.... salt DOES NOT evaporate, only the water evaporates leaving the salt behind. Even a dumb-a$$ like me know's that.
Her next statement was "various runoff's". There IS NO natural runoff, the canals & pumps are the only way to get that much product out of there & it called slurry mining.
Where is the logic in expecting to build up the quantity of the salt crust by pumping from the tailing ponds back into the flats when the drainage canals are still open back to the plant & the pumps are still pumping out from the water table? Again....This Is Slurry Mining & eventually there will be no product or profit in it so it will stop & no one will be held accountable for the loss of The Bonneville Salt Flats as a usable venue.
Here's a link to the video's I shot last year that shows the crystalline base. I didn't know exactly what that was then until I found it again this year & washed it off so I could really see it & it's actually a transparent green color that water doesn't penetrate. The break down of what is in this clip is 1/4" of salt crust, 1/4" of dirt/mud, 2" of the crystalline base then brine mud beyond 3ft, that was the length of my home made sample tool. As you can see the ground water leached into the hole in just a few minutes. Again, I only found the crystalline base at the 5 & 7 mile distance measured from lands end in a straight line toward floating mountain. Everywhere else was thin salt crust on the brine dirt.
My GoPro took a dump this year so I had no video to share.
Sid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe8de-Zhb6Q