page_title: Caliche
section_title: Examples of natural occurrence
hierarchical_section_title: Caliche / Examples of natural occurrence
caption_attribution_description: Wall at the end of a farm outbuilding. Preserved in Para Vista, Adelaide, South Australia. Wall is built with limestone rubble mostly, ploughed up from the fields surrounding, with red-brick quoins.
context_page_description: Caliche is a sedimentary rock, a hardened natural cement of calcium carbonate that binds other materials—such as gravel, sand, clay, and silt. It occurs worldwide, in aridisol and mollisol soil orders—generally in arid or semiarid regions, including in central and western Australia, in the Kalahari Desert, in the High Plains of the western USA, in the Sonoran Desert and Mojave Desert, and in Eastern Saudi Arabia at Al-Hasa. Caliche is also known as calcrete or kankar. It belongs to the duricrusts. The term caliche is Spanish and is originally from the Latin calx, meaning lime.
  Caliche is generally light-colored, but can range from white to light pink to reddish-brown, depending on the impurities present. It generally occurs on or near the surface, but can be found in deeper subsoil deposits, as well. Layers vary from a few inches to feet thick, and multiple layers can exist in a single location.
  In northern Chile and Peru, caliche also refers to mineral deposits that include nitrate salts. Caliche can also refer to various claylike deposits in Mexico and Colombia.
context_section_description: While the formation of other caliches is relatively well understood, the origin of Chilean caliche is not clearly known. One possibility is that the deposits were formed when a prehistoric inland sea evaporated. Another theory is that it was deposited due to weathering of the Andes.
  One of the world's largest deposits of calcrete is in the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana, where surface calcretes occur at the location of a now-desiccated prehistoric lake.
caption: Calcrete rubble was widely used for building construction in South Australia during the 19th century.
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