Myquestions

It has been a very cold and dreary winter and I have absolutely hated it, but the past couple of days it has been sunny, hallelujah me says. I have been nursing and entertaining the idea of going to the beach and soak up in the sun and possibly swim. That put me in a happy go lucky mood and I was smiling, in fact my smile had its own smile. Then it occurred to me that sea-water is salty and it messes up with my hair and my skin. That rattled my cage a bit because in my mind, I had packed my beach gear. I love reading at the beach or just watching the world go by. The realization that the sea is salty was such a wet blanket moment for me and I had to find out why it is so.

Rivers carry dissolved salts to the ocean. Water evaporates from the oceans to fall again as rain and to feed the rivers, but the salts remain in the ocean. Rivers are not the only source of dissolved salts. About twenty years ago, features on the crest of oceanic ridges were discovered.  These features, known as hydrothermal vents, represent places on the ocean floor where seawater that has seeped into the rocks of the oceanic crust, has become hotter, and has dissolved some of the minerals from the crust, now flows back into the ocean.

With the hot water comes a large complement of dissolved minerals. Estimates of the amount of hydrothermal fluids now flowing from these vents indicate that the entire volume of the oceans could seep through the oceanic crust in about 10 million years. Thus, this process has a very important effect on salinity. The reactions between seawater and oceanic basalt, the rock of ocean crust, are not one-way, however; some of the dissolved salts react with the rock and are removed from the water.

Then I got wondering. If that is how the sea got salty why is it that the salt content has remain constant and for the many billions of years that the oceans and seas have been in existence? Shouldn’t the water be too salty for any living creature to survive in it? But the laws of science dictate that dissolved salts are being removed from seawater to form new minerals at the bottom of the ocean, as fast as rivers and hydrothermal processes are providing new salts.

I guess we are not going to have shark or whale biltong because there is not enough salt to shrivel anything up and I have to put a sock on it and enjoy my sun with the salt.