Mining a rich legacy of potash (From The Northern Echo)

Mining a rich legacy of potash

11:56am Saturday 22nd January 2011 in Chris Lloyd

ABOUT 270 million years ago, part of the North-East was beneath the Zechstein Sea. This week, it was announced that it is hoped to dig the seabed up again, creating 5,000 jobs in the search for potash – the mineral which made North America.

Somewhere near the beginning of time, when landmasses were joined, east Cleveland was near the equator and covered by a salty sea which spread over Germany and Poland. As the land moved, the sea became trapped. The water evaporated, leaving salty crystals behind.

Over the millennia, the potassium crystals, which came originally from land and sea plants, became covered with soil so that now they are a mile or more down.

Only Pyhasalmi in Finland beats Boulby to the title of Europe’s deepest mine.

This week, another mining company has said it is going to prospect for potash beneath Whitby and Scarborough.

Potash is used in fertiliser, which is increasingly sought after as the human population grows, both in numbers and in wealth (more wealthier humans eat more meat which requires more fertiliser in the fields).

But before man ransacked the bowels of the earth for potash, he cremated a continent creating it.

Since the beginning of time, man has used potash for bleaching textiles, making glass and soap and cleaning wool. Before he burrowed deep to find it, he made it by taking the ashes from his wood fire, diluting them in water and then evaporating the solution in a large iron pot. What was left of the ash in the pot was the valuable potash.

This industry really flourished when agricultural European settlers arrived in North America and found their new estates deeply forested.

They felled the trees, rolled them into a pile and burned them, creating the ash which went to the ashery to be converted into potash and sold back to Britain.

In the century up to 1850, millions of American acres were cleared for potash.

But then, deep beneath Germany, the remains of the Zechstein Sea were discovered, and its potassium compounds were found to be more efficacious than American tree ash.

Today, Germany is the world’s fourth largest potash producer behind Canada, Russia and Belarus. Thanks to Boulby, the UK is in 11th place.

Boulby opened in 1973 and, 3,664ft down, is a weird underground world where salt dust rips up the nostrils, clears out the sinuses and hangs in crystals on the chest-hairs.

The seven-metre-thick seam is mined five miles out under the sea by strange, oversize machines that seem to have evolved to fit their dry, lightless world which was once a watery seabed.

LAST week, I was wondering about a description of weak tea as being “water bewitched and tea begrudged”. It seems to be an old Durham phrase, although Ann Stoddart, 87, reports hearing it in Newcastle where rather than let the tea brew, they allowed it to “mass”.

Rather than make a cuppa, they made “a massing of tea”, says Ann.

Marjorie Lambard reports that her father would say that the tea had been “bewildered”

rather than begrudged.

He would also order: “Show it to the pictures.”

The teapot was then held aloft and tea was swished around.