What salts are there?

Salt, or common salt, is sodium chloride (NaCl). Salt is mainly found in our oceans. There is so much that it never runs out. When we dry seawater, the salt is called sea salt.

Many millions of years ago when the Pangea continent moved, sea water was stuck in large inland waters. This dried up completely for many years and exists today as large salt deposits 300-600 meters below the ground surface. We mine the salt and then we call it rock salt.

But one can also drill a hole and pump down water which dissolves the salt and then because the pressure, it returns as a salt solution to the ground. The salt solution is further cleaned and dried in vacuum pans and then we call it the vacuum salt.

Our seawater contains about 3.5% salt. To produce sea salt, the sea water is introduced into a shallow lagoon, so-called saline. There, water evaporates with the help of the sun. At a certain density level, you pump it to the next saline where it will evaporate a little more and then salt crystals are formed on the bottom of the saline. The remaining water is pumped away and then you can collect the salt.

Rock salt is mined 300-600 meters below the ground level. There are a lot of mines in Germany and Poland.

Nowadays, it is too expensive to open new mines, so instead one drills a hole down to a salt deposit. You pump down water that dissolves the salt which you pick up as a salt solution, or "brine". The brine is chemically purified and dried in large vacuum boilers. Therefore, it is called vacuum salt. But it comes from an underground depot formed by seawater from the beginning.

Vacuum salt is the most expensive method, but one gets a cleaner salt than rock salt and sea salt. Vacuum salts are mostly used in the industry for example to make plastics.