Belarusian potash and the Salihorsk mountains

An orebody 35,000 hectares across, ten metres thick, sitting 400 metres under a town built in 1958.

The US Geological Survey records the Beloruskaliy Combine in Belarus as a plant producing potassium, and lists it under a stack of alternate names that show how the ground has been carved up: Soligorsk, the Soligorsk Mining Region, the Starobin and Soligorsk Deposit, Soligorsk numbers one through four, and the Nezhin deposit. The ore body is sedimentary in origin, lenticular and tabular in shape, formed by evaporation, and the minerals in it are sylvite and carnallite with halite, anhydrite, gypsum and dolomite alongside.

Read the record's numbers as a picture rather than a table. The ore sheet covers 35,000 hectares, runs about ten metres thick, and its top lies four hundred metres down. The survey gives its origin as evaporite, and its shape as lenticular and tabular.

The town above is new by European standards. Salihorsk, also written Soligorsk, is in Minsk Region in the south, near Slutsk and about 120 kilometres from Minsk, and it serves as the administrative centre of Salihorsk District. Construction began in 1958. It became a city in May 1963, and by January 1964 more than 18,000 people were living there. As of 2026 the population is 96,418.

It is a sporting town as well as an industrial one, home to Shakhtyor Soligorsk in football and a club of the same name in the Belarusian Extraliga ice hockey league. It hosted the Belarusian shooting championships in December 2002 and is twinned with Kohtla-Jarve in Estonia.

This is heavy industry rather than a collecting site. What is worth knowing is the scale: an evaporite sheet the size of a small county, four hundred metres down.