Alicja Kasprzyk 18. 04. 1956-19. 03. 2009 This volume is dedicated to Alicja Kasprzyk - an excellent evaporite specialist who passed away on 19 March 2009, after a 10-years-long struggle with incurable illness. She continued to work with passion whenever the circumstances allowed. In one of her letters to T. M. Peryt written a year before her death, she wrote: "The chances to stop the disease are certainly poor [...] Maybe it is ridiculous but I still work and hope". She was born on 18 April 1956 in Stalowa Wola. She graduated from the Academy of Mining and Metallurgy in 1980; her supervisor was Prof. Aleksander Garlicki, and her M.Sc. thesis was on "Evaporite deposits of the Kajetanów Bay in the Holy Cross Mts". She was holder of a Polish Geological Institute scholarship and started to work for the PGI in 1980, being based in its Holy Cross Mts. Branch in Kielce. In 1992 she received a Ph.D. degree from the Polish Geological Institute after a very successful defence of her thesis, that was entitled "Lithological and sedimentological characteristics of the Miocene gypsum of the southern margin of the Holy Cross Mts. (between the Nida and Vistula rivers)", supervised by Prof. Tadeusz Peryt. The greater part of the thesis was then published in the Annales Societatis Geologorum Poloniae in 1993 and was awarded the Ludwik Zejszner prize of the Polish Geological Society in 1994. Still working on her Ph.D. thesis, she got involved in scientific cooperation between the evaporite teams of the University of Barcelona and the Polish Geological Institute, and as a result of this collaboration and following post-doctoral stay at the University of Barcelona with Federico Ortí, she became an