Salt tectonics and its influence on the development of the Romanian Carpathians

Salt is present in many orogenic fold-and-thrust belts and it serves as an excellent décollement. This often leads to a localization of deformation (folds and thrusts) within the salt or to the development of salt diapirs. The Romanian Carpathians provide a natural laboratory for the study of salt tectonics in orogenic settings because of the mix of available data. The subsurface data was acquired mostly for hydrocarbon exploration and production but provides aid in the regional understanding of structural style, salt mines offer excellent exposures of cleaned walls and some amazing outcrops that can be used for taking samples and detailed measurements.

The layered rock salt exposed along the Carpathians strongly varies in impurity content, ranging from clean, almost 99% pure halite to salt rich in impurities ranging from micrometer to meter-scale fragments of various lithologies (sandstones, limestones, green schists, and volcanics). Studying these exposures and the difference in deformation and mechanical behavior of impure halite-dominated salt is of high importance when predicting the long-term evolution of underground storage caverns and nuclear waste repositories.

Here, we present how we combine classical fieldwork methods with UAV-based digital outcrop models, with microstructure and composition analysis to gain insights into the long-term deformation and properties of rock salt.

 

Acknowledgments: DMT acknowledges the financial support of UEFISCDI grant PN-III-P1-1.1-PD-2021-0165