Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Salt Mines

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

Alex Schmidt, Katie Goldin, and special guest Jason Pargin explore why salt mines are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Salt mines, known for being drudgery. Famous for being salty. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why salt mines are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm very much not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie, hello. Hey, hey, how's it going? It's going great. We are entering the salt mines and we're entering with a wonderful guest. His next novel is I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. It is on sale September 24th, so next week.

And please pre-order now because that is the most beneficial and you'll get the book sooner. Please welcome Jason Pargin. Hey Jason. Hello. I am going to try not to take today's episode to an extremely dark place because we're talking about something everybody's got. There can't be death involved in this, so I'm confident this will be a breezy good time.

And I want to thank many listeners. This was in general suggested by Roasty Toasty with support from Capulicious, Courtchester, XCarax, Zed Frank, Arcblade. They suggested salt, and that's a great topic. And we could do a whole separate table salt episode, and then I broke out the topic of salt mines. They exist. They give us wonderful salt and there's that metaphor people talk about of like, oh, the salt mines are a bad job.

Some of them were, but that's okay. It's still fascinating and worth talking about. I refuse to believe that anything ever bad happened in a mine. Yeah, I think the seven dwarves dug up gems there. I know that happened. Gems are good. Yeah, fun time while whistling. I don't know what could go wrong in an enclosed space underground. It sounds like heaven to me. Yeah. Hey, I like salt. And we always start with what we've kind of gotten into our opinion of our relationship to the topic. And Jason, you can start as the kind of gotten into our opinion of our relationship to the topic. And Jason, you can start as the guest. What do you think of salt mines?

Well, I am of the belief that one of the most important modern phenomena is our disconnect from all the stuff we have and how hard it is to get it. Like every little thing that you think of as being easy, like your access to fresh water. Somebody in the world is dying for that. And if you've ever been in a situation in the wild where you've had to find and purify your own water, you realize, oh, this takes an incredible amount of labor and it's very difficult and I'm going to die

because I can't do it. But we just take it for granted. Salt is one of those things where our language is full of salt metaphors and talking about somebody who's worked there. Salt, or you can take that with a grain of salt or saying these people are the salt of the earth. That's a very meaningful and profound thing when for most of us, salt costs pennies for

a box of it and we don't give it a second thought. The idea of being short on salt is ludicrous. But for most of history and most species that depend on it, getting it is incredibly difficult. Yeah, when you and I were document chatting about this topic, you mentioned Morton salt, where they had a whole innovation of making salt pour more easily out of a container. And even that we take for granted. It's just much easier than it used to be. Is that a thing that people know? I didn't know if people realized that when you, because most people out there, if I say close your eyes and picture a container of salt, you're picturing a blue little cylinder with a girl holding an umbrella. Do people know why that's

a thing? I don't think so. That their entire selling point was here is salt you can use even when it's raining. I feel like what? It's raining. You're like, what? It's like, well, no, because it used to clump up and they added a declumping agent. And so thus the slogan, when it rains, it pours. When it rains, our salt will continue to pour.

And that was a huge selling point. And that's why their logo is a little girl holding an umbrella and she's got a thing full of salt and the box of salt is draining out behind her because it's got a hole in it. And even in a rainstorm, it's capable of doing that. Thus, she will get home and have an empty container of salt and her parents will probably beat her for that. Things were very dark in the past, but that was how you sold things. And Katie, what do you think of the salt mines elements of this broader topic? Well, you know, I mean, I think as long as I get to turn into a cool ass donkey, I'm

all for it. Isn't that like, that was the thing in Pinocchio. In Pinocchio? Yeah, in Pinocchio, they're like, hey boys, want to have some beer and cigars? And then they turn, like it was kind of the first example of body horror that I guess was exposed to as a kid is like them turning into donkeys and being in agony. Sure. Yeah. Salt mines. I think I have a vague recollection of there's like a salt mine in where is it?

But it is like a country where they have giant salt mines that you can visit and they are like wildly incredible, huge and interesting. And so it seems interesting and I'm excited about it. And I've always just wanted to lick the walls of one of these giant salt mines to see what that fresh salt flavor is. We just did that bonus show about the popcorn formations in caves, like the ceilings and the walls and the floors. And maybe that primed us too. We're like, how do I consume the sides of a cave? Yeah.

There's a lot of geological phenomena that I want to taste. Let me edit. Yeah. Yeah. But also listeners, if you want a visual while you're listening to this, if you're driving down the road, you want to also look at your phone in addition to listening. Google pictures of salt mines. There's no uninteresting photo of a salt mine.

They're always huge. They're really cool and otherworldly. I've never been inside of one, but they're really cool places. And not to work, I wouldn't think. They're cool to look at from a far. As a tourist to pass through one, I'm sure it would be cool. Yeah, because I also have never been in one. When I went to Syracuse University for school. I just found out that that place is nicknamed the Salt City. The former sports mascot is the Saltine Warrior, which was a Native American mascot. And my only thought was I'm glad they changed the Native American mascot to a fun orange with a face. But I didn't think about like, there are cities

with a history of salt mining. You just don't think about these mines or where it comes from. I mean, saltine is that because I associate the word saltine with the cracker. That was also confusing. Yeah. Yeah. Is that also like a word for a tribal nation? Why is it called the saltine warrior? In their use, it was an even more confusing thing. It was like, this is a native warrior from a place that's full of salt. And so he is saltine in his ways. Like he's salty. They should have said the salty warrior, but then I guess that sounds like a sea captain or something. Well, see, the saltine warrior sounds like a cruel nickname for a Republican or something.

And with these Mayans are set of fascinating numbers and statistics in this week that is in a segment called... Know your stats. You must be able to mine the data. Stats. Dig into numbers that make you smooth. Know your stats. Use all your knowledge to solve those problems.

Equations strange as the dark side of the moon. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop. Hot guys shirtless. Yeah, everybody was imagining that. Those are some Salteen Warriors, am I right? Yeah. Yeah, everybody was imagining that. Those are some saltine warriors, am I right? Oh yeah. Yeah.

My first Disney crush. I think a lot of people see that. And that name was submitted by Zach W on the Discord. Thank you, Zach. There's a new name for this segment every week. Please make a Missillian wacky and bad as possible, possibly with Hot Warriors. Submit through the Discord or to sifpod at gmail.com. So do all of you listeners instantly know that that was a song from Mulan?

I hope so. Is that part of the fun that you don't tell them? And it's like, where is that? I know that's something. I know that's something. Where is that from? Yeah, sometimes we just carry on. It's up to them.

And all this week's numbers, they are about, I guess, muscular people, because it's about the basic techniques of salt mining. Most of us never think about how a salt is mined. And one of the ways is a horrible underground mine shaft. But the key number for framing this is three, because there are three general techniques that people either use one of or a combination of. For at least 2,000 years. They've mined salt these various ways.

So three different techniques. Is one like getting a bunch of frustrated deer in there to like lick things until they sort of turn into a slushie? Like the deer know where it is. The deer, they're like the truffle picks. They know. Yeah, the salt-sniffing deer. One of them is digging a big mine shaft, shaft mining.

The second way is a related system called solution mining. And the third way is letting salt water evaporate, either seawater or salty lake water. And we'll kind of talk about them across the episode. People don't need to memorize this to have fun or anything. There's an 80s comedy called Top Secret. It's an airplane type comedy. The McGuffin was they had a machine that could instantly desalinate seawater. It just inexpensively separate ocean water into fresh water. The protagonist takes one look at it and says, my God, we'll never run out of salt. And it was played as a joke because this guy's so dumb, he doesn't

realize that it's the water we want. That he's like, wow, an infinite salt machine. But even that joke plays off the fact that you don't think of salt as being something that is difficult to obtain. And it is. It's all three of these sound like a giant pain in the butt to do. Yeah. Even with modern technology, it's hard.

And before that it was so much harder. I can't even imagine. I literally can't fathom what an ancient mind looks like, but you're going to talk about it, this goes back centuries. I can't imagine without having even electric lights. Right. Yeah. Yeah. All of this, it sort of reminds me of coal mining. And then it also reminds me of like hunter gatherer stuff. Like a lot of it has been done for millennia, but then also some of it has been as hard and horrible as mining coal. It's a very specific thing. Because it was so much harder to mine for

back in the day. I mean, salt was a very rare commodity. If you look at old recipes, right, for food, you'll notice salt's not an ingredient because like, you know, it's not like they had ample salt for seasoning things. Like the idea, if you've ever had to go through like a low salt diet or something, you know, it's like, oh, salt really, like, we have gotten very used to salt being just like this fundamental flavor enhancer. The fact that now we have our sort of modern industrial techniques have made salt so much more accessible has completely changed the way that we experience food. Yeah, we really have been excited to add it at so many prior stages before you use your little shaker.

Like you're doing some ornamental extra salting with the shaker. It's very silly almost. Yeah. And so these three mining systems, they all go back a very long way and potentially the earliest one is saltwater evaporation. Saltwater evaporation has been done worldwide where people have a body of salty water near them. Two of the biggest examples are Hawaii and France.

We'll link the University of Hawaii at Manoa. They have information about native Hawaiian people who have been doing a long time practice that they call pa'akai, which means to solidify the sea. And the first way was just there were rocky shoreline pools. And when the water gathered and then evaporated, they gathered the salt. And then later on, they dug pools to do this on purpose. But they've gathered salt this way for thousands of years and do it to this day, especially on the western shore of Kauai, a community called Hanapepe. And the salt and seawater, you can just use that. You might want to process it to some extent, but you don't have to. People have just been getting salt that way.

We also see this in non-humans. There's examples of Japanese macaques learning how to season their food with salt. So like they will put yams in seawater. It seems like it originated from a single female and then she just like everyone started doing it and learning it. And it's like, this is great. These yams taste amazing now. And so they like put their yams in the salt water. And so you can kind of see how probably even before we were humans, I mean, understanding like evaporation is a huge step forward in cognition, right? Like we take it for granted because we're taught about it in elementary school, but like, you know, it is this process that you can't, it's very slow, so you can't really see it.

So like to figure out like, oh, actually I've noticed when I leave out this stuff, the water goes away and it leaves behind the salt. Like, you know, it's, it's, that's a pretty big cognitive advancement in human history. Well, I'm someone who grew up near, there's a town in Indiana called French Lick, which I always thought, man, that's profane. Like they allowed them there's a town in Indiana called French Lick, which I always thought, man, that's profane. Like they allowed them to call a town that. It's like, oh no, it's a salt lick. It's like the deer come and it's, you know, they come and lick the salt off the whatever. And so it's that's that the lick is an attraction. Yeah. Lick me like one of your French girls.

Yeah, like Lick Me like one of your French girls. Like one of your French animals. And then the French example of this dates back more than a thousand years at least. That's in the coastal region of Brittany. And to this day, it's now become like a luxury salt. The French name is Fleur de sel, meaning flower of salt. And they just let it gather in pools and then people hand rake it out. And apparently in medieval times, it was first done only by women. It was considered too delicate of a task for medieval Frenchmen. Just with their giant hands, like, oh no, I crushed the salt.

giant hands like, oh no, I crushed the salt. Oh yeah. Sock my blood, my big hands, they crushed the salt. They're like, Godzilla-ing the earth, like, oh, what man could do this? Geez. Oh, give me the baguette, oh no, I crushed the baguette with my big meaty hands. I feel like we have a rich history of any task that we found to be incredibly tedious, declaring that only the delicate hands and mind of a woman could have something like spinning. It's like, you know who would be perfect for this? The women. They're so good

at it. They're so naturally... Yeah. Right. This tedious task, you have to sit there silently doing this all day in the hot sun. That would be perfect for... God made women to do things like this while we will go discuss philosophy around the fire and drink some ale. Yeah, men's work. And then next technique also probably as ancient is what became shaft mining. It just started with

people chipping away salt from exposed deposits. It turns out we get a lot of our salt from underground deposits and we're pretty sure there are huge veins of salt under the ground because those used to be where seas and oceans were. And as continents shifted, as ice ages came and went like massive natural climate changes, the ocean water dries out and evaporates, the salt remains. And then it's sort of like seams of coal. You can just dig it up. And then in a few locations in the world, tectonic activity pushed it to the surface. And so people got salt that way. They just chipped it away. In one case, there's Montaña de Sal, which is a mountain shaped salt bed in Spain. That's just been pushed all the way to the surface and been chipped away at for about 12,000 years,

we think. Like the Neolithic, the new stone age people started. And then there's other places where people have been just digging to salt for more than a couple thousand years. So it was that shallow into the earth we could get to it. Okay. So easy. Super easy. Not to put you on the spot here, but what happens to you if you don't have access to salt? Because you have to have it, right? Like they weren't doing this because it made their food taste better. They were doing it because it preserved meat, but also you don't you have to have it? Yeah, it's sort of like sugar,

where it is a necessary nutrient for the human body. And then like a modern person says, oh, I need to limit my intake, but you do have to have it. And you can get it from foods without necessarily mining salt. It just like helps us get enough if we can dig it from foods without necessarily mining salt. It just like helps us get enough if we can dig it straight up and season it and control it that way. But there's like some salt in especially meat and stuff that we just eat. Yeah, like you eat some fresh caribou, some fish.

Yeah. You just eat them raw too. You gotta get a lot of salt from that. And maybe what I'm asking is unknowable because I think the listeners are probably asking how 12,000 years ago did they know that they needed salt? How did they figure it out? And is it a thing where they just knew it tasted good? Because that's like older than the Bible thinks the whole earth is. Yeah. I mean, I would imagine it's exactly like sugar tastes good. We crave it. I mean, a lot of animals have this instinct as well. You have birds that lick the cliff walls because it tastes tasty. It tastes like salt. It's salty. They like it. They like the mineral taste.

A cool one is like butterflies will gravitate towards the tears of like turtles or birds because they like the taste of the salt. So they go, you know, for a little butterfly, that's like, that's a huge amount of salt. So they go and you'll see like butterflies on a turtle head. And it's like, oh, that's so adorable. But they're like, cry for me. Like they cry to expel excess salt, not because they're sad. And so butterflies are there ready to sip up, slurp up those tears. Butterflies just whispering in its ear like, you know what I just saw? There's a sad puppy that's dying over the hill.

There's, nobody can do anything for it. It's so sad. And its mother left it and it's just, yeah, it's awful. Yeah. Philip J. Fry is frozen and he's going to be in the future. And his dog, everyone who's seen Futurama is weeping, weeping, weeping. It generally seems to be like a lot of other things their bodies need like vitamin C, where people did not comprehend vitamin C, but they just ate enough food that had enough of it that they didn't die. And then some sailors started to get scurvy later on.

And we were like, oh, no, no. But the salt is sort of that way where we love it, we know we love it, and a lot of our food had enough that people didn't die. But you really can die of not enough salt. The condition is called hyponatremia, which means water toxicity, like water flushes salt from your system. And the words mean too much water, but it really means not enough salt. Salt ions are incredibly important. It's the whole reason our brains work. It's the whole

way that we have osmosis through cells. So flushing out all of your salt kills you. And the other direction too, there was a case of someone, I think at University of Virginia chugging soy sauce and then you get too much salt, like hypernatremia. Like you have to really try, right? Like have to chug an entire bottle of soy sauce or drink water to the point where you would be throwing up. It's not something you can very easily accidentally do, so that's why not many people die this way, but it does happen, right? So don't do that.

And speaking of salt and water, that third way of mining is something that's more or less the most modern, but it's called solution mining. And it is where there is salt underground, you pump water down to the salt and then pump it back up after it has mixed with the salt and become a salty water brine. And so then you just boil the salt back out afterward. And that's a third way to get it. Really the key source for the whole episode is an amazing book. It's called Salt, a World History.

It's by award-winning nonfiction writer, Mark Kurlanski. And he says that in the part of Europe that's now southern Poland, they had hot springs that bubble through salt deposits. So it's a salt water hot spring. And dating back to 3500 BC, at least 5500 years ago, people would put the salty spring water in pots and use fires to boil the salt out. So even then, like the earth kind of showed us a way to do this third way

of salt mining. That sounds like a wonderful spa, hot salt water. I don't know, maybe that's not good for you, but I want to float in it. Yeah, some of these former salt mines either during or after became spas because people like the salt. And there's a thing, it's magnesium sulfate, but we call it Epsom salts. And it's named after a small town in England called Epsom where people soaked in magnesium sulfate springs.

The other thing that we actually get salt out of less than you'd think is giant salt flats. One number there is 50 to 70%. That's how much of the world's lithium is in a giant salt flat in Bolivia. We now are sending a lot of people to mine lithium out of it. It's called Salar de Uyuni. But that salt flat is more than 4,000 square miles. It's more than 12,000 feet above sea level. Not a lot of people live there. It's just too giant of a salt land. And so that kind of place we actually don't tend to mine much salt out of for like eating

and for our basic human need. So it's more getting it underground or getting it from seawater. The next number here, this is about amazing ancient mining. It's the year 250 BC. 250 BC, that's about 2,200 years ago. That's when engineers in China built a revolutionary salt mine that uses a few different techniques, including solution mining.

Mark Kurlianski says there have been major organized salt works in China since at least 800 BC. People in Sichuan have been gathering available salt since at least 3000 BC. We've really wanted salt that whole time. In 250 BC, an engineer named Lee Bing ordered the drilling of the world's first brine wells, like the first on purpose solution mining system. And that system worked and also killed a lot of the miners.

And here we go. This is where I knew where we were going to arrive. This opens up the darkest part of the show. This is Mark Kurlanski's description of what happens when they dug brine wells where they're mostly pumping water down. They're not going underground so much. But here's his description, quote, sometimes the people who dug the wells would inexplicably become weak, get sick, lie down and die. Occasionally a tremendous explosion would kill an entire crew or flames spit out from the boreholes. Gradually,

the salt workers and their communities realized that an evil spirit from some underworld was rising up through the holes they were digging. By 68 BC, two wells, one in Sichuan and one in neighboring Shaanxi, became infamous as sites where the evil spirit emerged. Once a year, the governors of their respective provinces would visit these wells and make offerings." Was this evil spirit like carbon monoxide or something? Pretty much. They were hitting a deposit of natural gas adjacent to the salt deposit. And so they were poisoning themselves with natural gas.

Yeah. That's not great. And they didn't really understand. So they were like, it's spirits, it's devils. Yeah. That's not great. And they didn't really understand. So they were like, it's spirits, it's devils. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't doubt those legends you find everywhere because in Lord of the Rings, the dwarves dug too deep and they ran into a demon. And it's like, I don't doubt there's folklore all over the place because like, wow, every time we dig one of these huge mines, something horrific happens. But we're not going to stop digging the mines. To be clear, we're not going to stop getting the gold out of there. That's much too important.

But it's like, yeah, all right. Yeah, but that is interesting because ignoring the folklore about sort of like, hey, when you live next to this body of water, there's demons there, so don't live there. And there have been cases where more modern people will ignore that because it's like, hey, that sounds silly and made up. And then it turns out there's carbon dioxide pockets underneath the water or it's like a cave that releases some kind of gas and then people get poisoned or suffocate and die en masse.

So it is interesting because you don't have to necessarily believe in spirits and demons, but if there is an entire culture that has been for many, many years going like, there's a demon that will just kill you in your sleep if you go near this cave. You might want to like test it. Take a like, you know, test kit there to see if it's a, you know, there's a lot of carbon monoxide or something. Right. Like nice try with your legend about a canary who died. I'm coal mining anyway. Thank you very much. Don't need it. We all know that the spirit is actually an old man in a costume trying to scare us away so he can get the insurance money or whatever those Scooby-Doo plots were. I actually don't remember what the motive for the guy pretending to be a monster always was.

It was always a carnival or something, like some business that is not profitable. Yeah, it was usually I think like insurance money or they're sick of kids coming near their house. You know, it's like, it's like homeowner, evil homeowner association person, like I'm sick of these kids on their bicycle. So I pretended to be a ghoul. Yeah, Scooby-Dee's audience loved zoning was like their favorite thing to talk about and think about.

Right. So, yeah, so they didn't really understand the natural gas, but they also solved it. It did take about 400 years. So that was a bleak period of not solving it yet. 400 years. You know, longer than United States history. It's all good. And so they solved it really

brilliantly. They solved it with pipes made out of bamboo. And either through luck or skill, they figured out that bamboo is resistant to salt, and then salt can kill algae and microbes that would otherwise combine with water and rot the bamboo. And so they built very long lasting bamboo piping systems where they funneled the natural gas out and then also kept brine mining the salt. And then on top of that, they were able to set up boiling houses powered by the natural gas. Then they could use the natural gas to burn away the water from the brine and get the salt. And they were doing this by AD 200. So more than 1800 years ago, a salt mine in China was our first natural gas-powered anything at all. It was our first natural gas-powered facility. That's wild. So like how did they... I mean, I know 400 years is actually quite a bit of time in human history, but to go

from it's invisible, how do we... Because natural gas, I don't think you can smell. The reason we can smell gas in our homes is they add a stinky rotten egg smell to it so we don't get natural gas poisoning or explode our house. But out in nature, natural gas is or explode our house. But like in the, you know, out in nature, natural gas is pretty odorless. So like there's this invisible thing that just like kills you and you're like, yeah, that's a ghost.

And that is like pretty good logic, right? Like we like to make fun of it, but if there's an invisible force that's killing you going like, yeah, it's demons. Like that's smart, that's logical. Cause what else could it be? So then to go from there to like, actually, this is something that we could pump out with like a pipe and

then also use in combustion. Like how do you get from this sort of superstition to understanding this invisible thing like so early on in human history. It seems like the key clue was the explosions. Ah! When somebody would make a spark and that's near a tube of natural gas and blows up. It seems like that led them to figure out that part. That's what I love about humans though. Because if like the ball-rog was real from Lord of the Rings,

within decades, we would have that thing powering our windmills and stuff. We'd create tiny, we would breed tiny toy ballrogs that you could carry around in your purse. Right. Yeah. Ultimately, the advancement of civilization the profit motive all of that Yeah, show me whatever monster you've got we will Right through selective breeding. We will humiliate you And like honey, I can't believe our bill this month from CEB Commonwealth Edison ball rock Stupid company. I'm purely upset about the letter I got. I don't respect the miracle they achieved.

You shall not pass on this great offer for cheap gas. And that astounding story. For one thing, salt mining is safer now, but like we say, there's no perfect way to make it safe. That leads into the other darkest part of the show and our first takeaway. Takeaway number one, underground salt mining operations often discover salt miner bodies. We often- Old ones or new ones?

Both but usually older ones. Like this is especially the shaft mining approach where you just dig a big tunnel into the ground. We will often find out that there was a tunnel here before where salt miners died and just kind of got walled off by the recrystallization of the salt and the abandonment of the mine. Like are their bodies more like, are they just bones or is there some preservation? Because like of all the salt. The second thing salt mummification. Oh, cool. And sad. I don't know how to feel about this. As dark as it is, it is to me even more just fascinating.

Like, like, wow, that this can happen. And so that's why it's on the show. just fascinating. Like, wow, that this can happen. And so that's why it's on the show. Yeah, because it is hard to overstate that everything in the modern world runs off of mining. Everything. Everything. Your phone, your car, everything you touch has been mined. And it will be like that forever. When we talk about like green energy or nuclear fusion, all you're talking about is different stuff that has to be dug out of the ground. And people will die mining probably a thousand years from now, it can definitely be made safer.

They make it as safe as they are forced to make it. But. Yeah, that's the history of mining too, where it's like, I could maybe give this person some gloves to handle this dangerous mining compound, but no, that's like 10 cents I'm going to lose per pound of sulfur or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, we can only protect 99.9% of the miners and also we protect less than that because the actuaries said we can lose a couple of guys and you know, we won't go out of business. And so that's the situation of it.

But I think that's the fun thing is anytime I watch a movie that's about like the future and it's like kind of utopian future and sometimes you'll see that photo people will share. It's like, well, this is what the world would look like if, you know, we got rid of capitalism, right? And it's all these beautiful buildings. And if you look at it, everything you're looking at came from my mind. The, the, the wonderful future of 500 years from now of robots and AI and flying cars and all of it, okay, everything you're describing, some filthy

person has had to dig and dig and dig in the dark. Yeah, there are some really chilling like letters you can read from miners who were trapped in say like a mine 1800s, even turn of the century, and they're just writing basically. And so it's it is very haunting. That being said, can we talk about the people jerky? Because that's interesting from like a scientific perspective. He's got a photo here we're going to get to in a little bit that's something. Okay. Should I look at this before dinner?

I think you'll be fine. I don't find it like too repulsive or anything, but it looks like a lot of especially South American mummies that I've seen in pictures. I see. Okay. And we talked on the past coal episode about how people have used coal for thousands of years, mostly from exposed seams, but most of the shaft mining is relatively recent for coal. Salt, we've been shaft mining for a lot longer. There are some deposits that we've been digging toward for a few thousand years. Especially in Europe, that was done by a lot of ancient French people that we call Gauls, ancient Germanic people. We also

get the name Gaul from salt mining. That is not what they call themselves. Gaul is what the Romans called them. And the word comes from Roman and Egyptian language, words for salts. Because Gallic people were that famous for these amazing mining shaft systems where they dig at like a 45 or 50 degree angle, where it's a steep slope. You just climb all the way down, carve blocks of salt out of the deposit and physically haul it up a steep slope, you just climb all the way down, carve blocks of salt out of the deposit, and physically haul it up a 45 degree angle. Jesus Christ. Which is awful work. It's terrible. Whoa. Is that where we... Is Gaelic where we got the term or the word Gaelic from? Is that the same

thing or is that a different word? It's related. Yeah. Some of my sources also called these people like Celts, like French Celts. And yeah, so Gaelic and Celt, they have a connection there. But the word Celtic isn't salt related so much. Right. But Gaelic, maybe? Yeah, that's related. Yeah. And these people were famous for trading their iron and their salts all over the river systems

of Europe. That was what they were known for trading their iron and their salt all over the river systems of Europe. That was what they were known for. And the Romans basically just learned and kept going a lot of these mines when they conquered those places. So they inherited it from the people they called barbarians all the time, even though they were like, oh my God, salt, fantastic. We have way more salt now. Yeah, inherited is an interesting term. There is a lot of interesting also like Roman sculpture and stuff, like the dying Gaul, where there's a weird cut, even though there was like a lot of propaganda about like these guys are savages, they're terrible. There was actually a lot of like art where there was some interesting respect for them where it's like depicting them in ways that are kind of like positive

or tragic. And it is a very interesting thing of like where they would sometimes conquer cultures and be like, Hey, look at look at how cool this culture is that we conquer. Yeah, totally. Like, like they even adopted a tool technique that the gulls figured out, which is like iron was the latest and hardest metal, but they used bronze tools to mine the salt because salt doesn't corrode the bronze and it does corrode the iron. This was very wise and they did it for a long time continuously in some places. There's a place in what's now Germany called Reichenhall that's been an active salt mine

since ancient Germanic times. There was a brief interruption when Attila the Hun invaded, but as a Germanic place into Roman province and then a place with German rulers and the post-Roman Empire Catholic Church, they just kept digging salts. And so that's one of many places where you can start a tunnel, lose some guys, and then find them centuries later or more than a thousand years later. That's wild. So can we talk about some of these people that we found? As far as the biology goes, there's not a ton to say. It's just that the miners got

either trapped or dehydrated because also, you know, they didn't have bottled water. So they need to like bring fresh water to guys in a tunnel of salt and they don't always do that that effectively. And these were often people who were prisoners or enslaved people and not cared about by the people in charge. And so guys just die. Well, this photo you have here is, looks so much like a stereotypical prospector with like the long scraggly hair and beard. I'm not saying it's comical. I'm sure he died horribly, but I've not seen like a prospector mummy before.

And it's like, hey, we dug down the mine and we found this mummified corpse and he looks exactly like a cartoon prospector from Toy Story. Right. I mean, the cartoons come from sort of a bastardized version of reality. And then human beings have not really changed that much physically, you know, since our inception. So like, it's just like, yeah, it makes sense.

The beard and the haircut and the boots, it's very like golden nugget casino, Las Vegas, which is not what you think about with mummies. Yeah. You think about a king. Like that's the thing about a mummified corpse is you can kind of tell what this guy was like. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. No, I know. Like you can see some personality there, which is harder. Obviously when you just have bones, uh, you know, archaeologists have to work pretty hard to figure out who this person was,

what their deal was, you know, reconstruct their face if they can. But if you have a mummy, you can, especially really well preserved one, which is the case for it looks like the case for the salt mummies. Yeah, you can kind of like see, I don't know stuff about like, obviously, it's hard to know if we're right about the judgments we're making, but you can see a lot of their personality, you can kind of see like, hey, that's their face. This is how they kept their hair. This is the clothes they wore. You can kind of see like, hey, that's their face. This is how they kept their hair. This is the clothes they wore. Yeah, totally. Like the picture we're looking at is not European. It's a mummy found in what's now Iran. This was in 1993, an active mine at Cherabad in northwestern Iran, found mummies from multiple thousands of years ago with a long beard, a single gold earring.

from multiple thousands of years ago with a long beard, a single gold earring. One of the mummies was a teenage boy. We've also done some finds in Poland because that spot in Poland where they had the brine hot springs, they proceeded to then start digging. And that digging started in the 1200s AD. Some guys get lost and then in the ensuing 800 years, we find mummies. There's even a controversial find in what's now the Uyghur part of Western China, where there's a highly politicized debate about the DNA of the mummies they found. And does it mean that European people and Celtic people were in Western China? We don't know. But with all of them, we find their stuff, their clothes.

We can kind of figure out what their face looked like. It's a very lifelike person. Gold earring, this guy, is one of the things. Yeah, that's interesting. I love that. Maybe he was just a rockin' dude, I don't know. This is where I most feel like Joe Rogan, where all I can say is like, dude, just think about this dude's like a hot shot miner.

He's got his gold earring, he's going to work and probably was like kind of a rocking dude. And then one day just assault just falls in and just buries you there. And then all these thousands of years, and you think if that guy had ever had to fight a gorilla, could he have won that fight? Joe Rogan is fascinated with whether or not somebody can fight a gorilla. I'm sorry, people aren't familiar. Yeah, he is like that. It is cool to see this guy's drip many, many years later where we can see, hey, this guy, this, many years later, where we can see like, Hey, this guy,

this prospector actually has some pretty good drip. Those boots do not look cheap. Like you think it was easy to make a pair of boots like that thousands of years ago? Like that was anyway. I think my, my theory now is that this guy was the boss and his death is hilarious. Right? Like he came down, like I heard you guys have been complaining about the structure of this tunnel, and then it fell on him. And you know, it's actually funny.

He's like knocking on like some support beam. He's like, do we need this crash? But yeah, and these mines are like all giant tunnels. We try to dig into the earth where they can collapse. And so, you know, sometimes they dry out or die of exhaustion or dehydration, but a lot of the times they just get crushed by the salt. And Jason pointed out an amazing story about a collapsed salt mine that is now a lake called

Lake Pinier, which is in Louisiana in the US. And in 1980, there were workers drilling for oil. They accidentally drilled into a salt deposit and undermined a salt dome. So then 65 acres of land became a giant sinkhole. And there was a tiny lake there that then became a 1,300 foot deep lake with a 150 foot waterfall before it kind of settled into being a much bigger lake today. I love that story because the jobs I've had, the worst you can screw up is actually fairly minor. Like you get something wrong in an article and you have to correct it or you say something

dumb on a podcast and some people yell at you. But having the type of job where you can accidentally change the landscape for the next thousand years because you accidentally drilled in the wrong spot and drained a lake and then created a 150-foot tall waterfall that was temporarily the tallest waterfall in the state due to the cataclysm you called because you drilled in the wrong spot. That's the type of thing I would do if I worked in drilling. That's the type of day at work I would have. I can just see it. Yeah. And then when we do that, we get a one-star review on Apple podcasts. And that's basically

a mind collapse. I actually am very brave. One star. Terraformed the area for the worst. 65 acres of just land collapsed. It's like, oh, hold on. I marked the wrong spot on the map before I turned on the thing. I'm sorry. Salted the earth too much. Also don't like the vocal fry.

Yeah, people be complaining. That's history. Yeah, well, and that just the scale of the danger and risk that salt miners have taken for thousands of years, I find it truly stiff. I find it amazing. And that's a bunch of numbers and a giant takeaway. We are going to take a quick break, then return with two more takeaways about astounding roles of salt mines and all sorts of cultural stuff impacting the world. One thing we all have in common, we all have a mind. It makes me so scared because I'm like, when is the bad thing going to happen? And minds can be kind of unpredictable and eccentric.

Everybody wants to hear that they're not alone. Everybody wants to hear that someone else has those same thoughts. Depresh Mode with John Moe is about how interesting minds intersect with the lives and work of the people who have them, comedians, authors, experts, all sorts of folks trying to make sense of their world. It's not admitting something bad if you say, this is scary.

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Womp womp. And this is not, you might think, oh, it's a geography issue? They both think it's their land? No, this is about the mining and the processing and the packaging and the branding. In the last few years, there's been a trend for Himalayan pink salt and then both countries got an argument about it. There's like this idea that if you have a Himalayan salt lamp, it releases ions that are good for you. I have not seen any evidence that this has any bearing in reality.

The salt lamps do look cool, right? But I do not believe they have any actual health benefits other than it's a cool lamp that makes you happy, I guess. You have to believe. That's why it doesn't work for you. You have to believe. I see. It's a faith-based lamp. Anyways, tell me about these geopolitics.

Well, the thing is I just went and looked at the website of my nearest grocery store. If you buy pink Himalayan salt as just the little thing of it to use in your cooking, it's a 700% markup. It's 51 cents an ounce versus seven cents an ounce for this Morton salt. I do not believe that in a blind taste test, you could tell the difference, but it is pink and it looks pretty to sprinkle it on top of things. It's pink. And when we say that this is driven conflict because this is like a suddenly valuable resource, I'm not saying that it's all just upper middle class Americans spending way too much on it

because they've decided it's magic, but that's not none of it. Yeah, there's even like, it's more of a table salt episode thing. Apparently the fine dining restaurant, the French Laundry, which is in California and famously Gavin Newsom went there during the pandemic, but they'll do like salt tastings as a course. Like they give you different salts and you try the salts. And like, like people get excited about salt varieties. And this one is, if it either feels or is different for your taste, that's great, but it is still salt. Like it's mined from the ground, like the other salt.

And the thing with the Himalayan pink salt is that the branding is somewhat true. It's from the area of the Himalayas, which runs through many countries, including both India and Pakistan. And most of it is coming from a mine in Pakistan. It's in the Northern Kura region, which is the red brick colored foothills below, like the tall snowy thing I think of with the Himalayas.

It's below Mount Everest, let's say. Right. the Himalayas. It's below Mount Everest, let's say. They just mine hundreds of thousands of tons of pink salts that are salts. To me, they taste the same and it looks nice. In the past few years, Himalayan pink salt has become a big trend in places like the US and elsewhere. As that got going, there were concerned speeches about it in Pakistan's Senate, like the legislature of Pakistan. Because the way the process has gone so far is that the salt gets mined in Pakistan and then it gets processed in India.

And they mostly did that because why not? It's just salt until recently. And then the price markup is not happening at the Pakistan stage. It's happening at the India processing stage. And then also it leaves the Indian facility with Himalayan branding rather than like Pakistani branding. Pakistan Senate leader Shibli Faraaz gave a speech where he said, quote, we are getting peanuts for this gold, end quote. And he's talking about the salt that they dug up and other people processed. That is a surprising

element of a conflict that's more famous for who controls Kashmir and stuff like that. I guess people are more racist against Pakistan than like Himalayas seem like, ooh, Himalayas, that's politically neutral and beautiful. And then it's like, Pakistan, isn't that something we're supposed to be racist about? Yeah, that's a, yeah. The US, there's some people in the US who hear Pakistan and they think was Osama bin Laden there recently, you know?

And so they aren't excited about that brand. On the other hand, you know, it's really coming from there and why not learn an exciting thing about salt from Pakistan? There's a whole episode to be done about this because one, the American consumer likes things that are a little bit exotic. And two, we associate adjectives with high quality. So if I'm buying oatmeal and then there's one thing of oatmeal that's like three, costs three times as much

and they're calling it French sun toasted oatmeal, I'm gonna be like, ooh, that's how they do it in France. And they could have put any country on there. Well, that's not true. There are certain countries that we associate with fanciness and some that we do not, and there's in the world of marketing. Because what was it, the Chilean sea bass that they had to rename because its old name

was like something turd fish or something. And so they attached a country to it and it's like, ooh, this is an exotic fish from Chile. I want that. And so the Himalayan pink salt sounds magical. It does. But if you associate it, if there are certain countries that we are more racist against it, it wouldn't mean anything. I find that really interesting. I had not known that about Chile and Seabass and fast Googling gives me Patagonian tooth fish. And you're right, that's not as strong of a... Chile, I think of a fun man in a hat in the mountains and Patagonian tooth fish, I think of like a grubby piranha or something.

Personally, I like that better because I want to feel like this fish at least had a chance. So if it's a Patagonian toothed fish, it's like that could give you a serious bite. So I feel like we are more evenly matched. Yeah, like I defeated a Marlin or something. Like, yeah, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

You want to bite me? Well, I bit you. Feels like a victory. And we have one more takeaway for the main show and then also a bonus show about a whole nother use of salt mines. But the last takeaway is takeaway number three. For at least 2000 years, salt mines have been religious worship spaces. Any religion or was there a sort of salt-based religion?

Oh, I would like that. This is at least three different faiths and across a few cultures. And yeah, it's not that specific. It's not like it's just Catholics or something and they're into it. They're just worshiping that guy that got famous for sprinkling salt in a funny way on TikTok or Instagram or something. Salt day guy. It's like, wow, he's really bending his elbow in an interesting way. He must be some sort of deity.

But this does come back to if you see these salt mines, they look like, if not holy places, they look alien and otherworldly. I can see why people would see this as, I don't know, they're just really cool looking. They don't look like anywhere else on earth to my eyes. And they all, you've got some great pictures here. Also, because salt, we just have all these positive associations with salt, right? It's tasty. It helps preserve food in a seemingly magical way. And then we associate it with all of these health benefits, some possibly real, some definitely not real. But like, yeah, I mean, there's so much sort of, I guess, religious elements that make sense to associate with salt. I

mean, it's in tears. Right. You know? And that phrase that I used earlier saying that someone is salt of the earth, that's from the New Testament. That's from a speech that Jesus gave. Yeah. If you've ever been to a Seder, you dip parsley in salt and I believe it's to represent tears. I forgot what the parsley is about. It does taste pretty good though. Salty parsley, surprisingly nice tasting.

Yeah. And this whole cultural role across the board is part of why there could be a whole separate table salt episode because between its value and its properties, people have been putting it into a lot of different cultural contexts. And the amazing shape of these mines, it's like the positive end of how we do a Balrog type folklore. It's incredibly dangerous and incredibly cool down there. Yeah, it seems really beautiful. There's a couple different houses of worship that you can visit inside of a salt mine. Like you right now, it's not just a past thing? And the first example is from those Pakistani mines for the Himalayan salt. And one

of the facilities contains a mosque. Pakistan's primarily Muslim and they've been digging in this spot for more than 2000 years. There's also just hundreds of thousands of tourists visiting this complex each year. A lot of these old salt mines or current salt mines are this way. Then one of the parts of the facility contains a small subterranean mosque. It's large enough for several people to pray in. The structure of it, the blocks of it are made of solid salt. Whoa.

They just used it as building material because it's right there. Until you break it down, it's hard. It sticks around. Your underground in the mine, but inside the mine is like a building made out of salt. Yeah. It doesn't really have high walls. It has low walls to demarcate where it is. Then there's a directional element to pray toward Mecca. And yeah, one of these pictures has a person in it. There's room for probably like 10 people. And part of the reason for some of these spaces is that the workers could pause and pray. And like, because they're down there for long shifts or it's hard to go back up, you can still like practice

your faith while you're digging for salt underground. And then this is not an outlier. The next example, it's a much bigger worship space. And this is a mine we talked about before in Poland. So this one part of Poland, first there were brine hot springs and then in the 1200s, Polish kings started having people dig. And along the way, they built a Catholic church inside of the mine because Poland is a primarily Catholic country. And there's wooden pews, there's a chandelier, there's some art, but the overall structure and shape is just the walls of salt of the deposit.

And they offered daily mass for the predominantly Catholic mine workers across a lot of the 1600s, 1700s. It's so interesting because it's like, yeah, I guess it is kind of difficult to enter and exit a mine, but you got to keep worship in. So why not put your house of worship in the mine? Yeah. And then it looks amazing too. Yeah. Yeah. Because like this next one, I think it's specifically an attraction, like this

one in Columbia, right? Exactly. Yeah. And looks like it, like you see it, it's like, I would like to go see this thing. It's really striking. I mean, because it looks like they retain sort of the natural walls somewhat of the mind. So you're looking at like these walls look like they're carved out of the natural walls somewhat of the mind. So you're looking at like these walls look like they're carved out of the salt. So the walls are still like made out of salt. Especially it makes me think of cathedral designers. Like it would be exhausting to

have an empty field above ground and be like, I need to wall everything completely and it all has to stand. And the salt cathedral, you can just kind of dig it out. Maybe that's easier. Maybe it's sort of a natural strength is what I'm thinking as a lazy cathedral architect. That is apparently my personality. Like if you pray hard enough, God will not let you inhale deadly gases or have a wall fall on you. And if it does, you didn't pray good enough. Exactly. Should have prayed harder. Yeah. Because yeah, this other one, it's at a site called Zipa Quira, which is near Bogota in Colombia. And it's from post-Columbian exchange. So it hasn't been going that long, but they built a giant

cathedral inside of that salt mine. And NPR says it attracts thousands of worshipers each Easter, and it's a major faith site for just the city of Bogota and that area. The goal is the beauty, not so much to keep mine workers working and not leaving to pray. Right. I mean, it is literally built into these sort of like translucent-ish walls that eerily reflect light in this way that looks otherworldly. So I can see how that feels spiritual. Yeah. It has amazing statue art that's made out of the salt. And yeah, in this picture, they've got it lit blue, but you could switch the lights up. And it looks like a truly amazing place to be. Like this is why cathedrals are attractions and

mosques are attractions and you want to go. They're really cool. And then I said we have at least three faiths. One more faith here is just kind of the entire mine for places where ancient Germanic people mined assault salts before the Romans came through. And Mark Kurlianski quotes the Roman historian Tacitus, who lived in the first century AD, there were still Germanic cultures in those places. And he said that the workers thought salt mines were an ideal place to pray to their pagan gods and that the gods would listen more attentively if a prayer was said in a salt mine. So them and other people have just kind of used the space to pray for a lot of history

and in a lot of contexts. Why did they think that gods would be more receptive to their prayers in a salt mine? We don't really know. I think it's just something about it being a special place. But I think if you see salt as being magic and it's having healing properties and cleansing properties and preservative properties, you would just assume that if you're at a place where there's tons of it, I think you would just assume you're at a magical, magical place. Yeah. I wonder if they ever found like salt mummies too, right?

Like if they ever found people who had died down there and they're like, dude, these dead people stay relatively like they were when they're alive. So that might have added to the mysticism around these salt mines. Yeah, totally. I would 100% have to think that, absolutely. Because you would have to look at that body and say, this did not decompose the way my father did when we buried him in the yard. And then when the dog dug him up and there's just bones left, it's like this person was, they were near immortality. They lived on, their body lived on. It's like, yes, this is the source of life. And it's funny because here's the thing, salt kind of is magic. It does everything. A culture that thinks of it as magic and holy and as a miracle is kind of more correct than the average person today who literally never thinks about it until their doctor says,

hey, you're getting too much salt and it's bad for your heart. I don't know if that's the thing doctors still tell people, but now you just take it for granted because like everything else is plentiful and who cares? But no, they were right. Salt is weird and magical and it does everything. To me, it is a form of like scientific reasoning of like, okay, like in the salt mine, there are these things that happen. Salt does this. It's clearly, there's something

going on with this that is like magical. Because like magic is the kind of pre-science thing where you know, we didn't have the ability to come up with any kind of scientific answers. So magic and spirituality is the kind of what we came up with in terms of explaining the world around us. And this is a place that must be protected and respected, right? And we shouldn't trash it or their reason may have been wrong, but the thing that we're doing made sense. It's all happening in a salt mine, a place I never think about and I've only heard negative things about. It's like also where people were like feeling the closest to God, you know? It's amazing. Right. And if you're naughty, you get turned into a donkey boy.

Which is a feature. Sounds pretty good. Right. Sounds good. I get cigars and beer and I'm a fun donkey. Great. If it's like going to hell or getting turned into a fun donkey, I kind of want to be a donkey. I'm going to pull a small cart and help people out. Right. Yeah. Have donkey thoughts. Hey folks, that's the main episode for this week. And I want to thank Jason Partjian again for making time to join us, especially in the

run up to the release of his book. It's titled, I'm Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom. And I tremendously enjoyed it. I didn't say that in the main show. I said to him another time, I really, really love the standalone novel he's written. This is not tied to his other works. It's such an exciting and clear yet surprising trip, is what I would say. I don't want to spoil any of it, but I'm starting to worry about this Black Box of Doom. It's out next week. When this drops, you might as well pre-order because that's basically ordering it with

how shipping times work or how your bookstore gets it. And I am so excited for you to read it. I'm starting to worry about this black box of doom. And there's a lot more to this outro because we've got fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. just help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, underground salt mining operations often discover salt miner mummies. Takeaway number two, the main salt mine for Himalayan pink salt is a new front in the conflict between Pakistan and India. Takeaway number three, for at least 2,000 years,

salt mines have been religious worship spaces. And then so many numbers about the first ever thing powered by natural gas and built by humans, the three broad ways of mining salt, the largest salt flat on earth, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode because there is more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now if you support this show at MaximumFun.org.

Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's topic is salt mines that became vast storage chambers and treasure hoards. Visit sifpod.fund for that bonus show, for a library of more than 17 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It is special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page

at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include the book Salt, A World History, that is by award-winning nonfiction writer Mark Kurlanski. Also thank you to a few different listeners for the tip on that book. We also used a lot of journalism, especially from NPR and from NBC News, also places like Atlas Obscura for amazing pictures of salt mines in various parts of the world. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca, I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people, and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skadagoke people, and others. Also Katie taped this in the country of Italy, Jason taped this on the traditional land of

the Shawnee, Eastern Cherokee, and Saatsa Yaha peoples, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, Jason's location, and many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description

to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding you something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is kind of astounding

cause it is episode six. And that is about the practice of going to the beach. It really, really ties in with the health benefit ideas about salt and seawater that we talked about on the salt mining episode here. So episode six, going to the beach, check it out. In addition to that episode, I want to recommend a podcast by our guest. It is called Big Feets. He and our buddies Robert Brockway and Sean Baby watch the let's call it reality TV show Mountain Monsters about guys hunting stuff like Bigfoots. I also recommend my cohost

Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals and science and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unshaven by the BUDOS Band. Our show logo is by artist Bert and Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. Extra extra special thanks go to our members. And thank you to all our listeners.

I am thrilled to say we will be back, next week, with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.