Part of an exhibit I designed for Geologic Cognition Society’s Underneath Is Before at SPACES , I recreated Brinsley Tyrrell’s work Salt of the City which had been commissioned by SPACES in 1996 and again in 2000. A salt boulder is left to dissolve in the elements. The gallery was located atop a 300 million year old salt deposit that was buried under 1700’ of glacial till in the terminal moraine of the Laurentide Ice Sheet. As part of this exhibition, I organized an expedition into the salt mine with the help of SPACES staff and Cargill Deicing Technology, operating owners of the Cleveland Mine.

As the weather dissolved the vein of pyroclastic ash the salt block calved a slab of salt onto the ground below - note the absence of snow around the fragment, this is an ancient ocean that has been reactivated to melt the surrounding snowpack. I gathered some of this slush around the salt and measured the salinity: 5.6%, almost twice as salty as the average ocean. Here, 300-million-year-old salt is reactivated by contemporary precipitation to form an improbable ocean.