Water On Your Maps Doesn't Have To Be Blue - CHECK THIS OUT!

Terraformer_Author

I was bored and surfing for entertaining things to ponder - when I came across this link:

http://www.museumoftheweird.com/2012/08/14/3648/

Seems that not only are greens, blues, muddy browns, aqua marines, and sandy grays natural water colors - but also RED! I was flabberghasted by this article about a river delta in France that is naturally BRILLIANT CRIMSON RED because of the salt content and bed soil oxydization! Seems that if you want salty deltas and lakes in your map world - it's perfectly reasonable to make them a gory blood red! WOW!
This would be a perfect location to film a Vampirella Movie, lol. This demands further research for map applications!

jslayton

Evaporation pools tend to be pretty small and often man-made. That's certainly the case for these pools in the Rhone delta (see attached Google maps screenshot http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Marseille,+France&hl=en&ie=UTF8&ll=43.37461,4.820938&spn=0.13401,0.163422&sll=35.622443,-117.661042&sspn=0.155446,0.308647&oq=marseill&t=k&hnear=Marseille,+Bouches-du-Rhône,+Provence-Alpes-Côte+d'Azur,+France&z=12 ):

jslayton

Note that the reddish color is often due to the halophilic (salt-loving) organisms that live in the high-salt water. Nothing much else can live there so they grow like crazy. In my area we have a salt mining company at Searles lake ( http://goo.gl/maps/Bdiqa ) that pumps brines out of the salt lake and onto the surface. At the end of the summer evaporation season, the ponds are a sort of cranberry red color and the salt crystals that form are stained pink ( http://images.google.com/search?num=10&hl=en&site=&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1280&bih=657&q=pink+halite&oq=pink+halite&gs_l=img.3.0.0i24l3.242.4932.0.6382.14.13.1.0.0.0.165.1453.1j12.13.0...0.0...1ac.xqOwHUexeU8 ).

The smell is odd and it's a weird feeling to start to float when you're barely up past your waist in the pools. The brine is super-saturated and very dense. It also heats oddly in the desert sun. By noon in September, the bottoms of the pools are still about 50F, while the top six inches or so are closer to 90F. Then when you get out of the pools, the brine dries to tiny salt crystals and turns your clothing into a poorly-jointed suit of salt armor.