It is said that people who come to visit this salt mountain will take away one kilogram of salt when they leave. How did this salt mountain come into being? What's so amazing about it?
The town of Herringen in Germany is not only a famous tourist attraction in Germany, but also attracts many people from other countries.
In our impression, most European countries are famous for their snow scenes, but Germany has a mountain. Even in the hottest summer, it is still covered with snow and turns into different colors in the hot summer.
This mountain is Yanshan Mountain. So far, this Yanshan Mountain is about 530 meters above sea level, which is the highest among the Yanshan Mountains we know in the world.
This salt mountain, located in the German town of Heeringen, covers an area of about 98 hectares and uses as much as 300 million tons of salt, all of which are potassium salts. This town is called the saltiest town by Europeans.
Looking at that salt mountain, people who don't know may wonder how this salt mountain was formed.
The geographical location of Hellingen town can be said to be a mineral-rich area in Germany, which leads to its high underground mineral content, especially the highest underground mineral content.
Compared with other areas where Europeans live, the mineral content here is dozens of times higher.
This has also attracted the attention of local government officials. In order to promote economic development and develop natural resources, a factory dedicated to refining these minerals has been built here.
The main job of this factory every day is to pump the groundwater in Heeringen town, so as to get the minerals you want.
They mainly extract potash fertilizer from groundwater through wet solution mining, which is one of the most important fertilizers in planting.
Although it is not the sodium chloride we eat in our daily life, when people come here for the first time, they will still joke that people here don't need to buy salt for cooking, just add some water. This salt pile is so high that it shows how high the groundwater content is.
These accumulated salts, that is, potassium salts extracted from groundwater, are not completely used for the extraction of potassium fertilizer, and only a small part of potassium fertilizer can be extracted, so the rest are "garbage" and accumulated here.
Over time, coupled with the limited treatment technology, the extracted potassium salt can not be fully utilized. The potassium salt here is getting higher and higher. Until now, it is 530 meters high, and there is the salt mountain we are seeing now.
The existence of this salt mountain does not seem to make people around feel proud or proud, but it has brought them great trouble. They also hope to remove this salt mountain as soon as possible.
The reason why it is not attractive to the local people is mainly because when it rains, these salt mountains will be washed away by the rain, and in severe cases, they will collapse.
Most of the farmland of those local people is near this salt mountain, which makes these farmland easily become saline-alkali land.
Crops can hardly survive in saline-alkali land, resulting in a fertile soil becoming a barren wasteland, which the local people can't remedy.
This salt mountain not only does great harm to the surrounding land, but also the salt content of groundwater resources near that salt mountain is higher than that in other areas.
This kind of groundwater with high concentration of minerals such as potassium is not drinkable, which undoubtedly causes great difficulties to local farmers, making it inconvenient for them to drink and use water, which can easily lead to the relocation of local population, population outflow and huge population crisis.
Although the local government tried to take measures to clear this salt mountain, famous local geological and chemical experts said that this measure not only requires advanced technology and a lot of time and time investment, but also may not achieve the expected results.
If it is razed to the ground by rain, it will take nearly 2000 years to level the existing salt mountain, and it can only be realized if there is no salt accumulation in the future.
The salt mountain just stood there. Although it has long been a heart disease for local government departments, when they were worried, a phenomenon appeared to let them see hope.
It is with the accumulation of salt mountain that its height is getting higher and higher. In summer, people will see a "Snow Mountain" standing there, which first attracts residents near Helingen town to watch.
As time goes on, more and more people come to visit. When people come back, they will tell others about this magical salt mountain. More and more people know about it and more and more people come to visit it. The level of local economic development has been greatly improved.
This made the government officials in Heeringen Town very happy. They suddenly felt that the Yanshan Mountains could bring such huge economic benefits, so they transformed all the places where the Yanshan Mountains were located into tourist attractions.
Although the Yanshan Mountains have made great contributions to the economic development of the town, and promoted the development of tourism and the improvement of people's living standards, the problem of salinization in the surrounding areas has not been solved.
Local government officials are worried about solving the problem of salinization while making money from salt mountain.
Through investigation, they found that when tourists are ready to end their journey, they will go to the shopping malls or shops near the scenic spots to ask and buy the most local products.
Therefore, government officials decided to give the potassium salt of Yanshan Mountain as a souvenir to visitors, and stipulated that everyone should take 1 kg of potassium salt with them when they left.
This salt mountain already contains nearly 300 million tons of potassium salt, and it is impossible for human beings to empty it overnight.
At first, the effect was not great, but local officials speculated that this method would take a long time, but it was still an effective method.
In order to let people take away more potassium salt, the scenic spot also tried every means, and finally put potassium salt into glass bottles and put the words "inedible" on them to remind tourists.
Not only that, they also dyed potassium salts and put colorful potassium salts in glass bottles. Just seeing them will give people a pleasing feeling and stimulate tourists' desire to take them away.
Although the Yanshan Mountain in Heeringen Town has promoted the development of local economy and the continuous improvement of local people's living standards, it has also brought about the problem of environmental salinization.
Over-exploitation of nature will only hurt human beings.
This tells us that as human beings, we should live in harmony with nature and protect and respect nature. Only in this way can we achieve long-term development.
We should pay attention to sustainable development, protect the ecological environment, and rationally develop and utilize nature for the future survival and development of mankind and the survival of future generations.