The Great Kavir is the largest salt desert in Iran. More than 50 salt diapirs are exposed along its northern fringe in the foreland of the Elburz Orogen. The Kavir diapirs are large, abundant, superbly exposed, and have correlatable stratigraphy within them. These qualities provide an unrivaled opportunity for detailed analysis of diapir emplacement.

The talk summarizes research on this topic by an international team. Field data collected in the 1950s is integrated with remotely sensed data to produce structural maps which are interpreted kinematically and dynamically in three dimensions. Our interpretation makes use of centrifuge and analytical modeling scaled directly to the Great Kavir. Some novel discoveries are: mushroom-shaped diapirs with peripheral pendant lobes, some of which are coiled in vortices, and a salt canopy comprising 12 laterally fused diapirs. Despite being among the largest exposed diapirs in the world, the Kavir diapirs are anomalously closely spaced. Tight clustering is explained by unusually low viscosity contrasts between two Tertiary evaporite units - a feature that also accounts for the peculiar growth of mushroom-shaped diapirs in the Kavir. Both diapirism and regional folding began only about 5 Ma ago; both types of deformation continue today.

Similar conditions that encourage the formation of mushroom diapirs and salt canopies may be present in the outer continental shelf and slow of the northwestern Gulf of Mexico.

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