Why is the ocean salty?
Everybody loves a summer vacation staying in a beach house with your loved ones. Imagine you are in a cool little beach house, you may like to get a little swim in the sea or grab that surfing board to get into action.
After the fun time, you may realize that you are fully drenched and you may feel, why is the ocean salty?
You may think that, if ocean is not salty, things would have been much easier from swimming to ending the global water crisis. Ah…a beautiful world is it not?
Well Mother Nature has her own answers for everything. It is what that makes evolution possible. Feel lucky dear human, we are the most intelligent species in the whole universe (at least as of now). Thanks to evolution.
When the world formed initially, the oceans may not have been salty like this. It is now because of the constant addition of ions into ocean that is taking place for about millions of years now.
Rain plays a very important part in making the ocean salty.
Directly speaking, rain water is the most purest water mankind can ever get, but indirectly rain has its own additives in it.
When rain droplets are formed, it reacts with the carbon dioxide (gas that we breathe out) in the atmosphere to form a mild carbonic acid. Which is why the pH of rain is 5.6 which is slightly acidic.
An ideal pure water should have a pH of 7, neutral solution — neither acidic nor basic. We have dealt this part in our ‘What is Acid Rain?’ post. Check it out.
Back to track, this rain which is a mild carbonic acid falls over the rocks and sand particles and erodes it very slowly adding the minerals and ions from these rocks into water. The water then flows through rivers and gets added into the ocean. You may ask us…
Why is the river water not salty?
Well, the concentration of these ions and minerals are very less in river water. The ocean has collected these ions for millions of years and that is why ocean is salty.
Although most of these ions entering the ocean are consumed in different ways by different lives of the ocean to maintain a balanced ecosystem, few are left that is getting accumulated for million years now.
The two main ions that gets accumulated are sodium and chloride, both salty in taste and are main ingredients of our table salt that we use to enhance the taste of foods.
Ocean water may differ in their salt concentration depending upon their location as temperature plays a part in water evaporation. The more the water is evaporated, the more the concentration of salt in the water will be.
Some isolated water bodies such as The Dead Sea, located between the borders of Jordan and Israel, has less amount of water getting added when compared to the amount of water that gets evaporated.
This negative water flow results in high concentration of salt in water, making The Dead Sea, one of the world’s saltiest bodies of water.
What are the other causes?
Not only rain, hydro thermal vents under the ocean where water comes into contact with the oceanic crusts makes water hot and reactive, giving them high amount of minerals that gets added into the ocean. These minerals also give ocean its salty taste.
Volcanoes in the ocean can also add considerable amount of minerals when they erupt.
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