[citation needed] Trona is found at Owens Lake and Searles Lake, California; the Green River Formation of Wyoming and Utah; the Makgadikgadi Pans in Botswana and in the Nile Valley in Egypt.

The northern part of Lake Natron is covered by a 1.5 m thick trona bed,[10] and occurs in 'salt' pans in the Etosha National Park in Namibia.

[14] Research has shown that trona can be formed by autometasomatic reactions of late-magmatic fluids or melts (or supercritical fluid-melt mixtures), with earlier crystallized rocks within the same plutonic complex, or by large-scale vapor unmixing in the very final stages of magmatism.

[15] The structure consists of units of 3 edge-sharing sodium polyhedra (a central octahedron flanked by septahedra), cross-linked by carbonate groups and hydrogen bonds.

Bacon and Curry (1956)[16] refined the structure determination using two-dimensional single-crystal neutron diffraction, and suggested that the hydrogen atom in the symmetric (HC2O6)3− anion is disordered.