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Brines supplied from salt extrusions cause significant groundwater salinization in arid and semi-arid regions where salt rock is exposed to dissolution by episodic rainfalls. Here we focus on 62 of the 122 diapirs of Hormuz salt emergent in the southern Iran. To consider managing the degradation effect that salt extrusions have on the quality of adjoining aquifers, it is first necessary to understand how they influence adjacent water resources. We evaluate here the impacts that these diapirs have on adjacent aquifers based on investigating their geomorphologies, geologies, hydrologies and hydrogeologies.

The results indicate that 28/62 (45%) of our sample of salt diapirs have no significant impact on the quality of groundwater in adjoining aquifers (namely Type N), while the remaining 34/62 (55%) degrade nearby groundwater quality. We offer simple conceptual models that account for how brines flowing from each of these types of salt extrusions contaminate adjacent aquifers. We identify three main mechanisms that lead to contamination: surface impact (Type A), subsurface intrusion (Type B) and indirect infiltration (Type C). A combination of all these mechanisms degrades the water quality in nearby aquifers in 19/62(31%) of the salt diapirs studied. Having characterized the mechanism(s) by which each diapir affects the adjacent aquifer, we suggest a few possible remediation strategies to be considered. For instance, engineering the surface runoff of diapirs Types A and C into nearby evaporation basins would improve groundwater quality. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.