Seminar

Solution-precipitation is a major deformation mechanism in wet crustal rocks. This process is particularly fast in rock salt. Notably, Talbot and Rogers’ classic (1980 Science) ground-based study suggested that for the Dashti salt glaciers in Iran, waters from a single storm event rapidly dissolves rock salt sufficiently to produce observable landscape motions within a few days. However, remote-sensing observations remain unsuccessful in detecting such weather-surface salt motion relationships. This may reflect the relatively low spatial and temporal resolution of remotely-sensed ground motion data, or potentially the early observations were incidental rather than diagnostic of process. Here, we present spatially resolved ground displacement at the Dashti salt glacier and the Mt. Sedom salt dome (Israel) from the Multi-Temporal Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (MT-InSAR) technique using Sentinel-1 radar imagery acquired between 2015 – 2018, followed by time-series and correlation analyses between derived ground displacements and weather observations. Our correlation analysis confirms that there is no immediate response of ground motion to weather events at the Mt. Sedom and Dashti surface salt bodies. Lastly, we calculated the vertical uplift rate in the two distinct uplift centers at Mt. Sedom: 1.85 mm/yr in the northern block and 2.60 mm/yr in the southern block. These uplift rates are ~5 mm/yr lower than prior interpretations from lower-temporal resolution InSAR analyses.