white alkali

American  

noun

1. Agriculture. a whitish layer of mineral salts, especially sodium sulfate, sodium chloride, and magnesium sulfate, often occurring on top of soils where rainfall is low.

2. refined soda ash.

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white alkali British  

noun

1. refined sodium carbonate

2. any of several mineral salts, esp sodium sulphate, sodium chloride, and magnesium sulphate, that often appear on the surface of soils as a whitish layer in dry conditions

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Example Sentences

The sun had lifted over the rim of the desert, a red disc which turned the gleaming white alkali patches to rose.

From Dangerous Days by Rinehart, Mary Roberts

They soon swept by Tad, and on out over white alkali desert once more.

From The Pony Rider Boys in the Alkali or, Finding a Key to the Desert Maze by Patchin, Frank Gee

A small, battered-looking car, grayed and caked with white alkali dust, glided alongside, and from under its swaying and disreputable top emerged someone I knew.

From The Killer by White, Stewart Edward

For days now, in the dry sage country, from the ford of the North Fork of the Platte, along the Sweetwater and down the Sandy, the white alkali dust had sifted in and over everything.

From The Covered Wagon by Hough, Emerson

Below this break the mesa side pitched steeply into a great basin that was blotched with white alkali flats, wave-marked with sand dunes, and broken with jagged hills and skeleton-like ridges.

From Bloom of Cactus by Coleman, Ralph P. (Ralph Pallen)