24 Hours In The Desert P.1
This weekend was the 77th annual Gem-O-Rama gem & mineral show in Trona, California aka BFE. It was an awesome time even though I only spent about 24hrs out there. Which leads me to this coming week of posts. I took a bunch of photos of unique things out there and will be posting them all in black and white each day along with the story behind them.
Today's post is about the pipes shown above that run from the lakebed to a processing facility. Searles Valley Minerals is a huge operation dealing in salts and borate minerals. The company has been harvesting the minerals since the early 1900's. Part of that process involves moving those minerals around to processing facilities. This photo shows a portion of the pipes that run for miles. I have not found out why there are these strange steps in the pipes, but there they are. I will definitely inquire as to their odd shape next time I am out there.
Later this week, Mineral Mondays - Pink Halite, Trona Pinnacles, Desert Rock Lizards and more. Thanks for reading.
I believe those shapes are put into the pipes to allow them to expand/contract without buckling the pipeline... Its mostly just a guess though... :)
Interesting and definitely a possibility since it gets so hot out there, but you can see the black pipe running parallel and it doesn't have those steps.
I think it definitely has to do with what moves through the pipes though, salt and borates. Ah, maybe it prevents build-upp of said minerals?
maybe those minerals( or whatever is traveling through the pipes) have a wider temperature range, or the material the pipes are made of has a different thermal coefficient of expansion than the black pipes?
Couldn't tell ya. I will find out some day though!