Re: How does my science project on crystals apply to crystals in real life?

For the Crystal Crusader:

When growing salt crystals, regular old NaCl, remember the ocean, all the salt flats of the world (aka "sabkhas") the Great Salt Lake, the Dead Sea, and the bag of pretzels in the closest vending machine.

There are two prime resources for the salt we use for foods and ice melting (etc) One is the ocean. As you can probably tell, the salt is dissolved and the water must be evaporated, leaving a scum of salt and other minerals behind. The ocean is salty because of millions and billions of years of evaporation and deposition into rocks that later eroded into the oceans (and on and on and on...)

The other way is to mine it from salt domes. These are bubbles of the earth's crust where the salt has flowed under tremendous pressure and heat. When it's under pressure, solid salt can become a viscous liquid. When it's mined in its natural form, NaCl is known as the mineral Halite. It's just as salty, and comes in large, regular cubes- the natural crystal structure for NaCl is cubic, just a bigger version of table salt as seen under a 'scope. The salt that flowed from rock to form the salt domes came originally from old ocean sediments.

As to your experiment, I really can't tell you what that means without having followed you around while you did it. Did you write it all down? If so, show it to your teacher, they seem to like to see the procedures and everything. In addition to that, do some net searches on halite, desalination, and salt flats.

If you boiled your water before letting it cool, the overall crystal formation should be a function of the percent that recrystallized to the time and temperatures allowed for recrystallization. Also see if you can't find a correlation between crystal size and the time that you allowed your crystals to cool. In most of the rocks I've seen and the sugar rock candy I used to make, the slower you cool it, the bigger the crystal will be.

Well, since your classes are probably almost over now, you may as well just try it again with sugar, get some friends to help you "analyse" the results. Best of luck!