Himalayan pink salt is mined using a “room and pillar” method, which involves drilling shafts into the ground and excavating large chambers around the salt deposit, leaving enough pillars of salt in place to keep the deposit from collapsing. The large salt rocks are then hauled to workshops where the are broken up and mechanically ground and screened to the desired crystal grain size, or worked into various shapes such as lamps, blocks, platters, and even shot glasses.

Himalayan salt is extracted from salt deposits in Salt Range of Pakistan. The salt deposits formed between 600 million and 800 million years ago. They are the most extensive salt deposits in the world, and possibly the oldest. The area where the Salt Range is now located was once covered by a shallow salty sea. High temperatures and low rainfall led to the gradual evaporation of the sea, leaving behind layers of salt and other sediment that were in turn were covered by layers of other sedimentary rocks like limestone and sandstone before tectonic activity thrust the plate deep under the earth. Salt acts a lot like a liquid under high pressure, so as it was compressed by the rock above, it formed big blobs that go hundreds or even thousands of feet thick called salt domes.

The formation containing what we now call Himalayan pink salt were later uplifted by tectonic activity, exposing the salt deposits to the surface where they were discovered about 2000 years ago by Alexander the Great. But nothing came of it until… (as legend has it) the Moghul emperor Akbar the Great re-discovered a deposit on a hunting expedition and opened the Khewra Salt Mine, creating a great source of revenue to the empire and now the largest and oldest salt mine in Pakistan.