Many different kinds of valuable metals can be found in the salt flats - including lithium - while the pools of brackish water are critical habitat for animals like flamingoes and vicuñas. However, the salt flats are occasionally pocketed with pools of brackish water. Down near the bottom of the depression, where the salt flats occur, the water is incredibly salty. There are different kinds of water in this depression generally the nearer the lip of the bowl, the fresher the water. In this depression, there's no outlet for the water, and because the bowl is in an extremely arid region, the rate of evaporation is such that enormous salt flats have developed over millennia. Think of a salar as a giant, shallow depression into which water is constantly flowing, both through surface runoff but also through the much slower flow of subsurface waters. She completed this work as part of her Ph.D in geosciences at UMass Amherst. "You can't protect the salars if you don't first understand how they work," says Sarah McKnight, lead author of the research that appeared recently in Water Resources Research.
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