The Leaching of Sub-Florescent Soils as Used in the AncientQanat Karez Technology to Produce a Modern Cheap Solutionfor Controlling and Adjusting Marginal World Albedo

Abstract

Huge desert endorheic basins with very substantial areas of flat evaporation pans were once in operation specifically for the precipitation of white crystalline sodium chloride. The Qanat Karez water distribution systems are thought to have been invented some 3000 years ago. Thousands of kilometers of tunnels and boreholes were designed and built with very heavy human investment, primarily to leach, dissolve and recrystallize salts - predominantly sodium chloride. They were only limited
in capacity by the Qanat volumetric capacity watershed surge flow into the endorheic basins needed to extract these salts. Today we know that in addition nature has continuously supplied these basins with these rich minerals and rare earth materials, which in many cases lurk only a few meters in the water table below the basin surface. In the Tarim basin a Potash salt production unit is now pumping these brines to produce industrial Potassium fertilizer, using the Qanat Karez technology. Maintaining an industrial thin white crust layer of salt during critical hot seasons of the year over these huge desert areas and salar flats would it is calculated, increase the world albedo and enable cheap precise control of the total short/long wave reflection, in addition to the existing high albedo of the Polar Regions.

The surface crust of an inland Sabkha basin typically is made up of layers of salts that have re-crystallized and settled or precipitated during the evaporation process of controlled Qanat system floodwaters. Leached Salts dissolve quickly in a desert endorheic basin, and over a short intensely hot period, the process of re-crystallizing the salts can produce purer and more concentrated layered playa cakes. The dissolved salts leached out of the underlying sub fluorescent layers in the vast desert basin flats are intermittently precipitated back onto the basin surface, to form a typical salt mirror, possibly the most ancient industrial process devised by mankind for use in two critical modern solutions.