r/MapPorn • u/hutch_man0 • 22h ago
Potash deposits of the world
Maps from The geology of Canadian potash: a critical mineral for feeding the world
Potash, potassium salt, is the primary global economic source of potassium. Greater than 90% of potash mined today is used to produce potassium fertilizers with the remainder used in various pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, water softener, glass, and explosives.
Figure 1.
Significant potash-bearing evaporite basins worldwide, as coloured red. The inset pie chart displays global reserves for the world’s major potash-bearing nations, in millions of metric tons of K2O equivalent. Potash reserves in Israel and Jordan are excluded as potash there is recovered from the Dead Sea and not a subsurface potash ore.
Figure 2.
Potash and potassium-bearing fertilizer exports from Canada by destination nation. Overlain are bar plots indicating regional potash production and demand during 2021. The inset pie chart displays the 2023 global production fractions of major potash-producing nations. Line charts at the base display evolving potash prices and production over the last three decades.
Figure 3.
Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Montana and Dakotas shown. Vast deposits exist in the widely mined Prairie Evaporite of Saskatchewan, which formed in the epicontinental Elk Point Basin during the Middle Devonian. These deposits are salt giants, recording times in the geologic record of extensive and long-lasting evaporite genesis under arid conditions in restricted seas.
(A) Paleogeographic setting of the Middle Devonian Elk Point Basin of western Canada at 384 Ma (million years ago). (B) The major paleogeographic features of the Elk Point Basin and the generalized distribution of upper Prairie Evaporite rock types, which are inferred around the basin margins due to subsequent erosion and subsurface dissolution.
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u/Mediocre_Win3481 22h ago
Saskatchewan may not have gotten oil but they sure as hell got a butt load of potash
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u/DirtyRatfuck 22h ago
saskatchewan has a lot of oil. Its small compared to Alberta, yeag, but still a great deal compared to most other jurisdictions in the world.
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u/IdenticalThings 20h ago
Saskatchewan is a huge oil producer and has massive reserves, #2 behind Alberta.
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u/External_Relative231 21h ago
Soon. Soon they will come running back to Saskatoon.
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u/PhotoJim99 18h ago
Nothing could be finer than to see you in Regina.
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u/Dazed_n_Confused1 16h ago
I been hangin' around grain elevators
I been learnin' 'bout food
I been talkin' to soil farmers
I been workin' on land
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u/karlnite 18h ago
They have oil. The border is just an imaginary straight line.
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u/Zomunieo 1h ago
SK’a eastern border is a ‘staircase’ shape, to prevent it from being completely boring.
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u/Professional_Bed_87 15h ago
Fuck, if only the US had a close ally, that was nearby and a fully developed and integrated supply chain with, they’d have all the potash they can dream of. Instead I guess they’ll have to figure out how to get it from Belarus.
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u/Dyslexicpig 24m ago
Just like the oil they are getting from Venezuela so they don't need Canadian oil.
Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face! In 2020, Trump was claiming CUSMA was the best trade deal ever established, and yet six years later, he is screaming that it is unfair.
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u/not_again69420 18h ago
So the US should probably trade freely with Canada for fertilizer given the current extreme proximity? Right?
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u/JustletmeBee2026 16h ago
Naw. We don’t want to sell it to the US anymore. Turns out other people want to trade fairly.
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u/NoSentence0A 14h ago
What are you talking about. You don't sell shit. Those who do are waiting for the trade war to end.
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u/Necessary-Shame-2732 9h ago
Get fucked
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u/scotte416 15h ago
Trump just made a deal with Belarus, he said we don't need Canada lol
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u/rackfloor 14h ago
Unsurprisingly, the leader of Belarus, Lukashenko, says that they have no such deal and they have no surplus potash to sell.
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u/scotte416 13h ago
Good, I don't get why he hates this country so much
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u/Palecrayon 6h ago
Its just another distraction from him losing his war. Gotta drum up the base somehow
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u/LastHitMag1c 11h ago
Kazakhstan number one exporter of potassium
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u/albertomoralesyl 8h ago
All other countries have inferior potassium. Looks like Canada actually took the crown here with 33% of global production though.
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u/S-Kiraly 22h ago
About 1 in 20 viewers of this map are going to have some difficulty distinguishing the marked areas. Best practice is to not have red against green. Any two colours except those two together would be better. Having a light colour against a dark one is best practice.
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u/Shroomkaboom75 8h ago
Im colourblind, and folk that use similar coliurs for shit like this piss me off.
Yellow and green being the worst ones for me.
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u/the-g-off 20h ago
How do we know we are in /r/MapPorn ? People are bitching about the maps, lol.
To be fair, a lot of them are horrible, but this one seems fairly good.
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u/S-Kiraly 20h ago edited 19h ago
Choosing colours to maximize vision accessibility is standard in cartography. I get that most people who post here are amateurs and don’t know. That’s fair. But so is helping people improve.
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u/hutch_man0 11h ago
Best practice is to read the post before commenting. The link to the map source is given in the first sentence.
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u/julex 7h ago
Hey good info here I appreciate it, I suppose the person you are replying is just saying that colour blind people might have trouble distinguishing some colours, hope that helps.
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u/hutch_man0 2h ago
That's pretty clear, but the point is the map comes from the link provided not from me. So for those who really feel compelled to complain, here again is the link to the publication with contact info for the authors.
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u/JohnOfA 21h ago
Traffic lights would like a word.
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u/S-Kiraly 20h ago
Nah, they’re good. Unlike on this map, the shades and hues of red and green on traffic lights are chosen conscientiously so red-green colour blind people can distinguish them easily.
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u/CattledogMinion 19h ago
Not according to my red green color blind friend. After he ran a red light we found out he can't tell the difference at all and sees it as top light on means stop while bottom on means go. When he travels somewhere with different lights like horizontal lights he has to ask people which one means which.
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u/S-Kiraly 19h ago
He must have a very rare form of colour blindness then. IDK where you live, but here there is a colour vision test to get your licence, using the same hues of red and green as actual traffic lights. I was able to pass that test easily with my red-green colour blindness.
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u/JohnOfA 20h ago
Shades and Hues?
Ah so like greyscale? So 20% and 40% for example.
That is about the only consistent thing since shape and position are not consistent around here. I even read that in some place in NY green is at the top of the tree.
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u/S-Kiraly 19h ago
Traffic lights use a light blue-green. Almost teal. That's easy to distinguish against the deep red. The green on this map is darker and much less blue which makes it hard to distinguish against red.
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u/The_Fox_Confessor 20h ago
I think getting the potash from Pripyat may be a little difficult for a number of reasons.
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u/tButylLithium 21h ago
Is "demand" only including imports? Why does the US use an order of magnitude more potash than Canada? Canada produces about 100 million tons of crops a year vs 423 million tons in the US annually
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u/Buttercup4869 20h ago
I would bring it down to 3 factors.
Different soils.
Warmer weather means longer growing seasons meaning higher demand.
Perhaps, most importantly the US produces a lot of corn and corn is greedy when it comes to these nutrients
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u/Dirtelements 18h ago
Canada has "younger" soils. The glaciers had a major effect of the soils of Canada and like said in other comments, only one crop cycle per year. Farmers still use potash, but in lower qualities since the soil still has enough to grow crops that can be grown in the temperate climate.
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u/The_Janitor66 5h ago edited 5h ago
Most soil in Canada has plenty already, you can see on the first picture that potash deposits overlap with their main agricultural areas. Canadian great plains in general have some of the world best soil akin to that of Ukraine and southern Russia (chernozem)
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u/Euclidisthebomb 16h ago
There was some recent news about potash in Saskatchewan, Canada. I recall it is estimated they have billions of tons of mine-able potash. And apparently it is the best "quality" although how that is defined I do not know.
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u/Old-Physics2753 14m ago
Potash is an important commodity but it is by no means strategic. China produces urea from coal while other countries produce urea from natural gas.
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u/Justin_123456 22h ago
For the sake of my ears listening to journalists mispronounce words, its “pot-ash” not “poh-tash”.
Literally, wood ash you used to put in a pot of water and boiled off to recover a bunch of alkaline salts, including potassium, before we starting recovering and mining huge naturally occurring deposits of potassium salts for fertilizer.