File:"Swiss cheese limestone" (Pain Pond, San Salvador Island, Bahamas) 1 (16322267522).jpg

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"Swiss cheese limestone" along the rocky shore of Pain Pond, northeastern San Salvador Island, eastern Bahamas.

Several categories of karst (dissolutional features in soluble rocks such as limestone) exist on islands in the Bahamas. Common small-scale karst features include phytokarst and solution tubes. Large-scale karst features include flank margin caves, pit caves, banana holes, lake drains, and blue holes.

Bahamian islands are often said to be composed of swiss cheese, in reference to the significant degree of macroscale dissolutional porosity in the limestone bedrock. The holes seen in the aragonitic limestone shown above were produced by dissolution in a freshwater-salt water mixing zone. The water filling these holes (just discernible in the photo) is close to marine salinity (I measured 36 to 37 ppt salinity on 24 March 1999). During storms and hurricanes, meteoric water having little to no salinity mixes with the salty water of the adjacent pond. Mixing zone waters have high aggressivity, in terms of calcium carbonate dissolution. This results in "swiss cheese limestone".

Once developed, these large to small karst holes act as conduits for rainwater draining downward to the water table. Rainwater doesn't run off into rivers or streams on carbonate islands in the Bahamas.
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Source "Swiss cheese limestone" (Pain Pond, San Salvador Island, Bahamas) 1
Author James St. John

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This image was originally posted to Flickr by jsj1771 at https://flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/16322267522. It was reviewed on 2 March 2015 by FlickreviewR and was confirmed to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0.

2 March 2015

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current21:15, 2 March 2015Thumbnail for version as of 21:15, 2 March 20153,008 × 2,000 (2.7 MB)Jacopo Werther (talk | contribs)Transferred from Flickr via Flickr2Commons

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