Hydrate Deposits and Thermal Stratification

We emphasize that it is not anhydrous salts but salt hydrates (and gas hydrates) that have this important thermal insulating property. Cool climates, which tend to support high hydration states, favor this type of process. Cold evaporitic basins are ideal, and so we find that Mars is where this phenomenology is most likely to have widespread relevance. 

The same phenomenology must be important locally on Earth, too, where thick evaporite deposits of hydrated salts and local thick beds of methane clathrate in permafrost or seafloor sediments should influence the thermal environment of the crust. The predicted control on the crust s thermal state by hydrate deposits should have consequences for the localization of hydrothermal springs around and within evaporite basins, hydrothermal metamorphism 

---