"Last night I described our fascinating and surreal trip to a successful "artisan salt" factory outside Charleston, West Virginia. The fascinating part is I hope obvious; the surreal part is that the people running the J. Q. Dickinson Salt Works are letting brine from a half-billion-year-old subterranean sea burble up to the surface, and then gently evaporating it down to its crystalline salt essence. They are doing this at a site where for millennia animals had gathered around salt licks formed where the brine came to the surface."
read further here:
Another Look at Salt-Harvesting in West Virginia - The Atlantic