An active diapir forcefully intrudes its overburden, driven by diapir pressure that overcomes the resistance of the overburden strength. Possible causes of the driving pressure are differential loading of the source layer and a density contrast with the overburden.

Grabens overlying diapirs have previously been ascribed to intrusion, withdrawal, or dissolution of salt. We propose, however, that many grabens or half grabens above diapirs form by regional thin-skinned extension of a brittle overburden.

In response to a need for a concise presentation of new terms and concepts in salt tectonics, we have compiled a glossary that focuses on ideas developed during the 1980's.

Occurrences of ground-water and soil salinization are numerous in the Concho River watershed and its confluence with the Colorado River in West Texas and in other semiarid regions of Texas and the United States.

Mushroom-shaped diapirs have an overhanging bulb fringed by one or more skirts (peripheral pendant lobes), which can curl inward to form vortices capable of entraining cover rocks to various degrees.

The manner in which sedimentary overburden accumulates significantly influences the growth of syndepositional salt structures.

Subsidence at salt domes results from man-induced and natural removal of salt, cap rock, minerals within the cap rock, and supradomal fluids. In the Houston diaper province, Frasch sulfur mining as caused subsidence bowls and collapse sinkholes at 12 of the 14 sulfur productive domes.

Ground water that moves downward from aquifers in clastic rocks of the Triassic Dockum Group and Neogene Ogallala Formation dissolves bedded halite and anhydrite in the Upper Permian evaporite section along the perimeter of the Southern High Plains in the Texas Panhandle.

Numerous salt-emission areas exist within the Permian outcrop in the Rolling Plains of Texas and southwestern Oklahoma. Sodium chloride waters underlie the area at relatively shallow depths, discharge from salt springs and salt seeps, and greatly impair the quality of ground and surface waters.

The northern Salt Basin in West Texas and New Mexico is a closed hydrologic system in which discharge of ground-water flow occurs in a series of playas, or salt flats.